Buy a classic that will likely greatly appreciate in value in the coming years. Get an old Browning Auto 5. It's like owning an old Porsche roadster. It's not beautiful until you look at it for a while, but it fairly reeks of class and character, is welcome anywhere, and will draw admiring glances where ever you go. On top of that, Auto-5's are rock-solid reliable and now, over 100 years after John Browning came up with the design in 1898, these guns are still among the fastest-operating autoloaders ever made. They shoot only 2 3/4 inch shells which are fine for waterfowl (as long as you don't shoot steel shot). In fact, the Auto 5 made it's reputation as an all-weather waterfowl gun. There are a few drawbacks. Its a little heavy by todays standards. It would have been fine for upland birds when I was a young man, but at my age now, I wouldn't want to walk too far with one. Finally, it's a HUNTERS GUN, not a fun shooting gun. In other words, its a recoil-operated gun that KICKs and you don't want to fire one any more than you really have to. Don't get me wrong. That first shot is a lot of fun. Maybe even the first five or six shots. But each succeeding shot after the first one is a little less fun than the one before it was, until finally about 12 shots down the string you become acutely aware that the recoil from that last blast hurt your arm, and you know the next one is going to hurt it even more, and so on. Shoot it in rapid succession more than about 15 times and you'll have a very nasty bruise, and won't be able to shoot a gun again for three weeks. But as a stationary stand, waterfowl gun that you'll probably shoot no more than five or six times a day, it still has few equals.
