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Glock 19 Gen5 MOS
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Browning factory records
Who holds this maker's production records today, whether a serial table exists at all, and what it costs to have the archive read them.
Browning publishes a reference that is genuinely useful and genuinely awkward, because it is really two systems in one. From 1975 the year is encoded inside the serial as a two-letter date code. Before that the company published first-and-last intervals, and those intervals overlap — so a serial can legitimately sit inside two published periods at once. Browning says as much itself: the company notes that its serial records before 1958 are estimates only.
Who holds the records today
Covers Date-code system from 1975, interval tables before that
Serial table published by the maker?
Yes.
manufacturer
Interval tables pre-1975, letter date codes after. Overlapping intervals mean the honest answer is sometimes a span, not a year.
Can a serial number date a Browning?
Yes — the maker publishes a table, so a year can be estimated from the serial number against a source you can check yourself. The date is only as precise as the gap between two published entries, and manufacturers do not build in strict serial order.
Reference work
Browning: The Guns and the Company — —.
Date a firearm by its serial number
The lookup covers only makers that publish their own browsable chart — and it says which, and cites the threshold behind every result.
Open the serial number lookup