“America’s oldest gun manufacturer, Remington, has agreed to replace millions of triggers in its most popular product — the Model 700 rifle. The company has been riddled for years with claims the gun can fire without the trigger being pulled, often with deadly results.”
The company still refuses to admit the guns are defective, and insists its offer to replace the trigger mechanisms in nearly 8 million guns is not a “recall” and says it’s doing this only to settle class action lawsuits filed in Missouri and Washington, according to CNBC, which aired a documentary in 2010 that “explored allegations that for decades the company covered up a design defect.”
CNBC says its investigation found the defect was discovered by the Remington engineer who designed the trigger mechanism, shortly after he designed it, who warned the company in a 1946 memo of a “theoretical unsafe condition;” and CNBC also discovered that a 1947 inspection report that confirmed the guns could fire “simply by switching off the safety or operating the bolt” called the situation “very dangerous from a functional and safety point of view.”
But Remington rejected the designer’s proposed fix, because it would have cost 5 1/2 cents per rifle (54 cents in 2014 dollars), and continued to manufacture and sell the questionable trigger mechanism until 2007, according to Wikipedia article’s on the Model 700.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102236497?trknav=homestack:topnews:6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_Model_700#Misfiring_Controversy
Well, you know, better late than never I guess. Although it would have been never, but for those pesky tort lawyers filing the sort of lawsuits that conservatives want to outlaw under so-called (and seriously mislabeled) “tort reform” laws.
Hey, I have an idea — since these guns are widely used by law enforcement, maybe the cops can get themselves off the hook by saying, “We didn’t shoot that guy. The gun fired by itself.” That may
not be as far-fetched as it sounds.