The Browning Citori is a double-barreled shotgun of the "over-and-under" or "stacked-barrel" type, with one barrel above the other. It is marketed and distributed by the Browning Arms Company in

Morgan, Utah Morgan is a city in the U.S. state of Utah and the county seat of Morgan County. It is part of the Ogden-Clearfield metropolitan area. It is named after Jedediah Morgan Grant, a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who ser ...

, and manufactured for Browning by the

Miroku Corporation ( OSE7983 is a Japanese firearms manufacturer located in Nankoku, Kōchi Prefecture. Their products include shotguns produced for Browning Arms Company and rifles licensed by Winchester Firearms. In European markets, these products are so ...

in Nangoku, Japan. The Citori is manufactured in a wide variety of models, styles, and gauges to accommodate enthusiasts of

clay target Clay pigeon shooting, also known as clay target shooting, is a shooting sport involving shooting a firearm at special flying targets known as clay pigeons, or clay targets. The terminology commonly used by clay shooters often relates to time ...

games such as

trap A trap is a mechanical device used to capture or restrain an animal for purposes such as hunting, pest control, or ecological research. Trap or TRAP may also refer to: Art and entertainment Films and television * ''Trap'' (2015 film), Fil ...

skeet Skeet may refer to: * Skeet shooting, a discipline of competitive clay pigeon shooting ** ISSF Olympic skeet, a variant used at the Olympic Games People * Skeet Childress (born 1979), American guitar player in the band Look What I Did * Skeet Qu ...

, and sporting clays, as well as upland bird and

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hunters.

Origin

The Browning Citori was introduced in 1973 as a more affordable version of the highly successful

Browning Superposed The Superposed introduced a wide variety of innovations including the single select trigger and over-under design. This design was considered revolutionary in the 1930s, but it was later found that Browning had already made a model of this design ...

. The Superposed, which was first sold in 1931, was the last completed firearm design by the famous small arms designer

John Moses Browning John Moses Browning (January 23, 1855 – November 26, 1926) was an American firearm designer who developed many varieties of military and civilian firearms, cartridges, and gun mechanisms many of which are still in use around the world. He ...

. In 1977, the Browning Arms Company was acquired as a subsidiary by the FN Herstal company of Herstal, Belgium, which continues to oversee operations today. The name "Citori" has no meaning and is an advertising construct.

Features

Browning Citoris come in all of the popular shotgun shell

gauge Gauge ( or ) may refer to: Measurement * Gauge (instrument), any of a variety of measuring instruments * Gauge (firearms) * Wire gauge, a measure of the size of a wire ** American wire gauge, a common measure of nonferrous wire diameter, ...

s, and are made in an over-under "stacked" barrel configuration, with forends and

buttstock A gunstock or often simply stock, the back portion of which is also known as a shoulder stock, a buttstock or simply a butt, is a part of a long gun that provides structural support, to which the barrel, action, and firing mechanism are attache ...

s made from high quality walnut wood. Barrel lengths can be purchased from for skeet shooting to for sporting clays and

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. The top barrel has a vented rib attached by soldering for the entire length of the barrel tube. Newer Citori internal barrels are chrome-lined for added surface strength. All metal parts are bright blued for the standard model. "In-the-white" higher grade models with more elaborate machine-applied engraving can also be purchased. Rubber recoil butt pads (12 gauge) or plastic butt plates (sub-gauges) are standard. Citori

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s are made with internal hammers and coil springs and all Citori models have shell ejectors, which expel spent shells when the breech is opened by pressing aside the top lever and bending the action fully open, which also re-cocks the internal hammers. The Browning Citori has a single, gold-plated

trigger Trigger may refer to: Notable animals and people ;Mononym * Trigger (horse), owned by cowboy star Roy Rogers ;Nickname * Trigger Alpert (1916–2013), American jazz bassist * "Trigger Mike" Coppola (1900–1966), American gangster ;Surname * Bru ...

. A barrel selector mechanism is used to choose whether the top or bottom barrel fires first. The barrel selector is combined with the manual

safety Safety is the state of being "safe", the condition of being protected from harm or other danger. Safety can also refer to the control of recognized hazards in order to achieve an acceptable level of risk. Meanings There are two slightly dif ...

and is located at the top rear of the receiver, behind the top lever. If the first shot misfires and the gun does not

recoil Recoil (often called knockback, kickback or simply kick) is the rearward thrust generated when a gun is being discharged. In technical terms, the recoil is a result of conservation of momentum, as according to Newton's third law the force r ...

, the trigger can be reset to fire the second shot. This is accomplished by moving the safety/barrel selector back to the "safe" position and then forward to the "fire" position, without changing the barrel selection. Opening the action does not automatically engage the safety mechanism. Current Citoris feature screw-in Invector choke tubes to regulate shot patterns downrange and thus provide versatility for usage in hunting and target shooting. These can be used with either lead,

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, or steel shot. Older models had factory fixed chokes, and steel shot is not recommended for use with those. Some newer 12 gauge and 20 gauge Citori models have back-bored barrels. These are barrels with slightly larger bore diameters. Their purpose is to improve shot patterns by reducing the friction of the shot charge on the barrel wall, while also reducing felt recoil. Models with back-bored barrels use Invector Plus choke tubes.

Sources

Performance test of Browning Citori Lightning Field Grade, Ruger Red Label, and Beretta Silver Pigeon, ''Gun Tests'', January 1997

* [https://web.archive.org/web/20061021072653/http://www.outdoorlife.com/outdoor/gear/fieldtested/article/0%2C20280%2Cshotguns-0005%2C00.html Field test of Browning Citori 525, ''Outdoor Life'', Summer 2002]
Bourjaily, Philip. "Shotguns: The Best Guns of the Year" (2002), ''Field & Stream''

* ttp://www.chuckhawks.com/browning_citori_shotguns.htm Hawks, Chuck. "Browning Citori O/U Shotguns", ''chuckhawks.com''
"What is Back-Boring?", Browning Customer Services Top Questions

References

External links

*{{official website, https://www.browning.com/products/firearms/shotguns/citori.html
Browning Citori owner's manual
via

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

Double-barreled shotguns Browning Arms Company