ly stooped, 62, bald except for a
rim of gray hair, and wears a closely clipped gray moustache. His
face is marked by a network of fine lines.
Although Browning will not talk of himself or of his career as an
inventor, he can't help talking when the conversation is turned on
guns.
"I always think of a gun as something that is made primarily to
shoot," he says. "The best gun is the simplest gun. When you begin
loading a gun up with a lot of fancy contraptions and 'safety
devices,' you are only inviting trouble. You complicate the
mechanism and make that many more places for dirt and grit to clog
the action.
"You can make a gun so 'safe' that it won't shoot."
Of Browning's new guns it is not, of course, permissible to give any
details. One, however, is a light rapid-fire gun, weighing only 15
pounds, which can be fired from the shoulder like the ordinary
rifle. Each magazine carries 20 rounds and the empty magazine can be
detached and another substituted by pressing a button.
The heavier gun is a belt-fed machine, capable of firing 600 shots a
minute. Although it is water-cooled, it weighs, water jacket and
all, only 28 pounds. For airplane work, where the firing is in
bursts and the speed of the machine helps cool the gun, the jacket
is discarded and the gun weighs only 20 pounds.
Both guns are counted upon as valuable additions to the equipment of
our overseas forces.
THE NARRATIVE IN THE THIRD PERSON. Although the interview, the personal
experience article, and the confession story are largely narrative, they
are always told in the first person, whereas the term "narrative
article" as used in this classification is applied only to a narrative
in the third person. In this respect it is more like the short story. As
in the short story so in the narrative article, description of persons,
places, and objects involved serves to heighten the effect.
Narrative methods may be employed to present any
group of facts that can be arranged in chronological order.
A process, for example, may be explained by showing a man
or a number of men engaged in the work involved, and by
giving each step in the process as though it were an incident
in a story. The story of an invention or a discovery may
be told from the inception of the idea to its realization. A
political situation may be explained by relating the events
that led
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