2006. April 1st actually. I know that because it was my folks 40th anniversary and I bought them plane tickets to Belgium as a present. Then I flew over there to meet them as a surprise. Dad and I went and toured the Browning offices while mom went shopping for Belgian lace table "covers"--- I guess you would call them. Dad found a fvcking BEAUTIFUL Browning over and under-- I mean it was gorgeous. Silver sides with hand engraved bird dogs on one side and a flying pheasant on the other. Amazing dark walnut stock with a few "birds eye" knots in the stock. Don't know why he found those appealing but he did. It was "new SUV" worth in price, but hands down the most beautiful shotgun I'd ever laid eyes on.
Dad talked to the honcho in charge and negotiated a price and I watched as the honcho broke it down and placed it into it's equally gorgeous case and then boxed it up for dad. There was a gun dealer in Houston that he had a relationship with, and that's where dad was to pick it up. Since he and mom had flown out of Bush, he was able to pick it up a few weeks later when he and mom returned home.
I know my dad was meticulous when it came to guns, and if someone would have made some sort of stamp on the metal, I imagine my dad would have raised holy hell because it would devalue the gun.
The situation is different since your dad made arrangements with the manufacturer directly. As you know, FN (Fabrique Nationale d'Herstal) is the Belgian manufacturer that has long made many of the guns bearing the Browning name, including the top-tier Browning shotguns. Since FN obviously continually exports loads of guns to the U.S., I imagine that they were able to ship the gun stateside without your dad really having to do much of anything. In all likelihood, FN shipped the gun to Browning Arms Company in Utah (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of FN that serves as the official importer/marketer), which then routed it to the dealer in Houston.
The roll marks or engravings for the Browning company name and location are applied by FN at the time of manufacture on guns manufactured for sale in the U.S. market. The same is the case with factory-applied roll marks (or impressions on polymer frames) that you see on other European guns sold here that reference a European company's U.S. subsidiary, which serves as the official importer. These factory-applied markings satisfy the 1968 Gun Control Act's import marking requirement; they appear on the guns as a matter of course and are not seen as in any way degrading their original condition.
If, hypothetically, your dad had instead visited some retail gun shop in Belgium and purchased a shotgun not intended for export to the U.S. -- meaning that it would
not be marked "Browning Arms Company, Morgan, Utah," but instead "Fabrique Nationale d'Herstal" -- then the process would have been very different. He would have had to obtain an import license from the ATF by submitting Form 6 and, through an export agent, an export license from whatever the ATF equivalent is in Belgium. If he had used a commercial importer in the U.S. to take care of all of the paperwork, customs brokers, etc., the gun would have to have been marked with the commercial importer's company name, city, and state (as in the photos in the Simpson Ltd. link I posted above) before it could have been transferred to him. If, in this hypothetical situation, he had gone through the trouble of doing a personal import instead of a commercial import, he would have been able to avoid the import marking requirement.
The import marks I'm talking about with disgust are ones that are applied in the U.S. by a commercial importer that has no affiliation with the manufacturer, not the ones that are applied at the time of manufacture on guns produced for export to the U.S.
