Baby Browning (.25 ACP)
Kim du Toit
January 14, 2003
12:00 AM CDT
Heheheh… here’s one I used to own back in the old days of the racist Republic (that would be South Africa circa 1979 for those who’ve been living on another planet).
There have been many small pistols made, but the best of them all is the Browning .25 ACP (aka. “Baby” Browning in 6.35mm Browning). The reason I owned one is quite simple—I inherited it from my Dad, and never bothered to register it with the S. African Police [spit]. We had a saying back in those days: “Everyone should own at least one unregistered gun” (Brits and Canadians take note)—because if ever the authorities ever did get round to confiscating all registered guns (a simple matter of looking up the names and addresses and going round to collect them), it was always wise to have one the bastards didn’t know about.
This was my gun that no one knew about, and right before I left S. Africa I gave it to someone, for his gun that no one knew about. He still has it, by the way.
Okay, the .25 ACP isn’t much to write home about—even with modern bullets, it’s worse than marginal as a defense cartridge—but it’s sure as hell better than no gun at all.
I used to carry mine inside my sock, and no one was ever the wiser. All I had to do was be careful how I sat down, making sure that my right leg was tucked away somewhere. To this day, I sometimes find myself sitting that way in company.
One thing—the cartridge wasn’t much, but it sure was loud coming out of that tiny barrel, and the sound alone was enough to make anyone know that someone was shooting at them. Here’s a pic of another one, this time in blue steel:
Browning introduced the Baby in 1905 (actually, they were made by Fabrique Nationale [FN] in Belgium), and stopped making them in (I think) 1969, but the world and his brother have all made copies of the Baby—Astra, Bauer, PSP, and all the alphabet soup manufacturers have a variant out there.
Baby Brownings are surprisingly expensive (anywhere from $300 to $$$ell your firstborn, for one of the “presentation” models). The copies are cheaper, but generally of lower quality.
I might get another Baby one of these days, just for sentimental reasons—but purely out of habit, I’m not going to tell anyone about it.
Gratuitous Gun Pics
