Nothing wrong with semi autos as long as you obey the safety rules. If you really want one stick to Beretta or Benelli. As Bryan has already implied they don't give £120 away without reason.
I don't think you can imply that there's anything wrong with them because they're offering cashback! At work we sell a specific type of office equipment and the manufacturer is frequently running marketing promotions such as 'free upgrades' (get the better version for the price of the standard one), bundles (buy one get accessories free), and yes - cashbacks.
They don't do that because no-one is buying their product, or because they think there's something wrong with it and want to offload it - indeed, they are the dominant player in the market with a highly recognisable brand, a very reliable product and 70-80% market share. But they still run the promotions anyway (perhaps that's
why they have 70-80% of the market!)
This manufacturer tells us that everytime they run a cashback promo on the machine their sales go through the roof - and what the manufacturer really loves about cashback promos is that that the sales go right up but only 30% or so actually bother to claim the cashback! (I know it sounds a bit crazy to buy a product because it has a promo and then not bother to claim it, but that's the way these things work. Remember the infamous Hoover holiday ticket promo fiasco? It wasn't that they were idiots who didn't think it through - They calculated the profits based on only a smallish % claiming the tickets, and they based that on the claim rates on similar promotions they had run. But what caught them out was that the deal turned out to be a lot more popular than their previous ones and too many people claimed)
As far as I know Browning are a very reliable brand, and as it's an american company (and americans love semi's a
lot more than double barrelled) I would guess there are a hell of a lot more Browning semi-autos out there than Beretta semi-autos...
Also, if you look at gun trader the most discounted guns (from rrp) tend to be the Berettas. So you could claim that there must be something wrong with Berettas that everyone is selling them off at such a big discount. In reality it's much more likely that, because they are probably the most popular brand in the UK, there is much more competition amongst the dealers who are all cutting the prices and price matching each other to get a piece of the action and that's why they're so discounted.
Stuff like that is just marketing, plain and simple, I would read anything else into it. The big brand gun manufacturers don't make guns for the fun of it, they're businesses and as such their goal is to sell guns. Some might want an 'exclusive' rolls royce type brand, while others might want a more 'sell to everyone' brand, but at the end of day they want to sell guns and market accordingly...