On National Left-Handers Day, we celebrate the Browning BPS
By Casey Sill
If you read the Pheasants Forever Journal back-to-front — today is your day.
August 13 is National Left-Handers Day in the US, and no one feels the scourge of the right-handed masses more than hunters and shooters. Our options for everything are limited, and shotguns are at the top of that list.
Learning to awkwardly push trigger safeties with your thumb is a real bummer, but the pain of being a left-handed shooter is often shared by right-handed fathers trying to find a first shotgun for their backwards kid. And for 47 years, one gun rose to that challenge more successfully and reliably than any other — the Browning BPS.
From 1977 to 2024, the BPS was the go-to shotgun for young, left-handed shooters. It was recently discontinued, and while I hate to see her go, I’d like to say thanks to Browning on behalf of southpaws everywhere for the nearly five decades of bottom eject, tang safety bliss.
I opened my BPS on Christmas morning 2003. The next spring I shot my first tom with it, then my first rooster, then my first mallard. In the 21 seasons since, it’s been with me at every turn. I’m notoriously hard on shotguns, and that BPS has taken everything I could throw at it for two decades and kept on chugging.
I’m not saying the BPS is the greatest shotgun ever created. There are plenty that are just as reliable and don’t weigh 37.5 pounds. But the Browning classic has stood the test of time, and will live alongside working class blue bloods like the Remington 870 in the annals of shotgun history. More importantly, it holds a special place in the heart of countless lefties, who took one too many spent shells to the face and set out in search of a better way.
I’ve got a couple of truly left-handed shotguns these days, and they’re great. But in November, when the roosters get wise, the mallards get fat and I inevitably develop a case of the yips with my new-fangled guns, I turn back to the BPS.
So to all the southpaws out there, have a happy National Left-handers day. Here’s a tip of the cap to your hard working BPS if you’ve got one, and may the lefty scissors always find their way to the top of the junk drawer right when you need them.
Casey Sill is the senior public relations specialist at Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever. He can be reached at csill@pheasantsforever.org.