The Paradox and Absurdities of Carbon-Fretting and Rewilding

Herschel Smith · 28 Jan 2024 · 4 Comments

The Bureau of Land Management is planning a truly boneheaded move, angering some conservationists over the affects to herd populations and migration routes.  From Field & Stream. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently released a draft plan outlining potential solar energy development in the West. The proposal is an update of the BLM’s 2012 Western Solar Plan. It adds five new states—Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming—to a list of 11 western states already earmarked…… [read more]

Remington Settles

BY Herschel Smith
2 years, 8 months ago

ZeroHedge.

Remington and the families of nine victims from the Sandy Hook school massacre, the second-deadliest school shooting in US history, have reached a settlement that was years in the making: the gun-maker and manufacturer of the Bushmaster AR-15 used by shooter Adam Lanza will pay a total of $33MM. Divided up among the families, that comes to $3.66MM each (before the lawyer’s cut). The families insist the money is no substitute for the brutal killing of their loved one.

According to Reuters, the settlement must still be approved by the Alabama judge overseeing the Remington bankruptcy case. The plaintiffs allege that Remington’s marketing contributed to the shooting. In a February court filing, the plaintiff’s legal team  argued that the value of their claims could exceed $1 billion, including punitive damage – a pretty obvious negotiating tactic.

Sickening.  Why didn’t Remington fight this all the way?  There is a federal law in place to prevent this sort of thing.  Why did they cave?

And tell me why I should ever buy a Remington product again?

Via WiscoDave.

What A Terrible Situation For Remington And Its Workers

BY Herschel Smith
3 years, 5 months ago

News from NY.

ILION — Following complaints by the union as well as U.S. Rep. Anthony Brindisi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, investigators from the National Labor Relations Board  launched a probe into the outgoing owners of Remington Arms, which laid off nearly 600 employees ahead of selling the 206-year-old firearms plant in a bankruptcy proceeding.

United Mine Workers of America, Local 717, has complained of what they say are unfair labor practices when the company in October laid off 585 employees without severance pay or continuing health care coverage, which the union says is in their labor contract.

“Our career experts in region 3, Buffalo, have begun an investigation,” NLRB Congressional Liaison Kevin Petroccione wrote in an email on Monday.

One of the allegations contends that “Within the previous six months, the Employer unlawfully dominated or controlled the operations of a labor organization,” and the “the Employer failed and refused to recognize the union as the collective bargaining representative of its employees.”

In a better world, Remington’s previous management would not have sold out to Cerberus Capital, “financial engineers” who had no intention other than to fleece all capital out of the company and leave it in shambles.  Good men don’t do that to a company, no matter how much they are paid to do it, no matter how many homes on the beach and in the mountains they are promised.

In a better world, workers would not be in a collective bargaining agreement anywhere, because that means there is no right to work by other men who need to feed their families.  They are blocked.  They cannot cross the line into the plants.  There is no competition between men.  The competition is between companies, and Remington got destroyed by that.

This is all a failure to live life by Biblical principles, whether on the part of the management or the workers, or both.  In the mean time, quality went down, innovation stopped, design ideas stayed on the drawing board or never even made it that far, and men simply worked their shift while the management got rich.

How sad for everyone.

This Is One Good Reason There Is No More Remington

BY Herschel Smith
3 years, 5 months ago

After everything else Remington has been through – the Sandy Hook lawsuit, awful management, the Remington 700 trigger system failures and their refusal to own the design and correct it – there has to be this.

ILION, N.Y. — Workers at the sprawling Remington factory in this upstate New York village took pride in a local gunmaking tradition stretching back to the days of flintlock rifles. Now they’re looking ahead with uncertainty.

Jacquie Sweeney and her husband were among almost 600 workers fired by the company this week, a few months after Remington Outdoor Co. sought bankruptcy protection for the second time in two years.

Successful bidders for the idled plant in bankruptcy proceedings have said they plan to restart at least some production, though details remain scarce.

There are high hopes for a successful reload of the plant that dominates the local economy. But these hopes are tempered by questions about how many workers will come back, and when.

“My husband, he’s looking for work, just like everybody else. And I plan on going back to college unless I find a job before I start that up,” said Sweeney, recording secretary for the local unit of the United Mine Workers of America. “That’s all we can really do. We can’t sit around and wait for forever.”

It’s common for people here to say that Ilion is Remington and Remington is Ilion. Company founder Eliphalet Remington started making flintlock rifles on his father’s forge near here in 1816, and the Ilion factory site dates to 1828. Though the company moved its headquarters to Madison, North Carolina, the old factory dominates — literally and figuratively — a village that has long depended on workers making rifles and shotguns to power the economy.

Union signs reading “United We Stand with Remington Workers” are in the windows of local businesses that sell everything from pizza slices to steel-toed boots. At Beer Belly Bob’s beverage center across the street from the plant, Bob McDowell recalled the sales bump on Thursdays and Fridays after shifts ended at 3 p.m.

Remington’s recent history has been a roller coaster ride with a lot of drops. Layoffs have been common. The plant, which employed around 1,200 people eight years ago, was down recently to about 600 union workers plus an estimated 100 or so salaried workers. The company began moving two production lines to a new plant in Huntsville, Alabama, in 2014.

[ … ]

Roundhill pledged in court documents to bring back at least 200 workers. They could eventually add hundreds more, but details are not clear.

Well, that was an idiotic thing to do.  This is why.

Local officials believe a number of pieces need to be in place before production starts, from a collective bargaining agreement with the union to a new federal firearms license.

The UMW said it has held “productive discussions” with Roundhill. Meanwhile, it also has excoriated the outgoing owners for terminating 585 workers this week along with their health care and other contractual benefits. The union said the company is refusing to pay severance and accrued vacation benefits, sparking pickets in Ilion this week.

Legally, I agree with them on the issue of paid vacation.  I agree with them morally on the issue of severance.

Collective bargaining helped kill the plant and company.  You have a right to be a member of any organization you wish.  What you don’t have a right to do is prevent another man from working your job.

Don’t repeat the mistakes.

Remington Lays Of 585 Workers

BY Herschel Smith
3 years, 5 months ago

Times Union.

ILION — Despite finding a new buyer, the bankrupt Remington Outdoor Compay laid off 585 employees on Monday and said their benefits would expire later in the week, without severance pay, according to the union that represents them.

Some of the workers, though, may be called back to work in the coming months.

“This outrageous action by Remington Outdoor company is a slap in the face,” said Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, which represents most of the more than 700 people who work at the gun factory. He said the union is exploring legal options to fight the layoffs and lack of severance pay.

“We are now working with the new company to get the plant reopened and start putting our members back to work. But the old, failed Remington had one more kick in the pants for our members,” he said.

[ … ]

The company is expected to hire back 200 workers within 60 days, according to state Sen. James Seward’s office, whose district includes Ilion. It wasn’t immediately clear, however, if the new workers would be represented by the UMW as the company is emerging from bankruptcy.

United Mine Workers of America.

That’s one reason Remington is bankrupt.  Combine collective bargaining with awful management, poor foresight and engineering second rate products that no one wants, the Remington 700 fiasco, and being behind the development and innovation curve, and this is what you’ve got.

Bushmaster had to compete with Daniel Defense, Rock River Arms, LaRue Tactical, BCM, and a hundred other brands.  Remington 700 had to compete with Bergara, Tikka, Savage, Ruger and a hundred other brands.

The Regulation Of Advertising That Threatens The Public’s Health, Safety, And Morals Has Long Been Considered A Core Exercise Of The States’ Police Powers

BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 5 months ago

So says the Connecticut Supreme Court.

They are seeking information about Remington’s marketing strategy for the Bushmaster AR-15. The question is whether gun manufacturers such as Remington actively marketed assault weapons such as the AR-15 “to civilians for criminal purposes” in violation of the state’s consumer protection laws, Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Richard Palmer wrote in the March decision.

“We also conclude that Congress has not clearly manifested an intent to extinguish the traditional authority of our legislature and our courts to protect the people of Connecticut from the pernicious practices alleged in the present case. The regulation of advertising that threatens the public’s health, safety, and morals has long been considered a core exercise of the states’ police powers,” Justice Palmer wrote.

They don’t really believe that a legitimate manufacturer would market anything “for criminal purposes.”  That’s self defeating, as criminals get caught, thus preventing future sales to said individuals.

That’s just legal-speak for “We don’t like you and want to see you go bankrupt.”

As for where the prog nanny state goes from here, you’ve heard the most concise admission you’ll ever hear from any prog.  They’re smarter than you and want to regulate your morals.  Not the morals of abortionists, but of you.  Morals is decided in the halls of Congress, or in other words, by the deeds of demons, gargoyles and pit vipers.

Go back to your labors, peasants.

U.S. Supreme Court Let’s Sandy Hook Families’ Lawsuit Against Remington Proceed

BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 5 months ago

Via WiscoDave, this awful news.

The Supreme Court said Tuesday a survivor and relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting can pursue their lawsuit against the maker of the rifle used to kill 26 people.

The justices rejected an appeal from Remington Arms that argued it should be shielded by a 2005 federal law preventing most lawsuits against firearms manufacturers when their products are used in crimes.

The court’s order allows the lawsuit filed in Connecticut state court by a survivor and relatives of nine victims who died at the Newtown, Connecticut, school on Dec. 14, 2012 to go forward.

Because when you wear a black robe, you’re entitled to the attribution ‘god’ and can ignore the law any time it suits your political goals.

Because ‘supreme’.

Queue up the lawsuits against every firearms manufacturer in America.  I’m guessing the ‘supremes’ won’t allow analogous lawsuits against Ford and GM to go forward.  After all, no one should sell a truck as dangerous as the F350 to anyone.  It can kill people if it runs over them, but we can’t allow Ford and GM to go out of business.

How Cerberus Drove Remington Out Of Business

BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 11 months ago

New York Times:

By choosing to place Remington in a Southern state, Press was acknowledging how much the gun business had transformed. Historically, gun makers operated in the North, in New England’s “Gun Valley” or, like Remington, in upstate New York. Smith & Wesson and Colt were established in the 1850s by businessmen in Massachusetts and Connecticut, respectively. During the Civil War, arsenals in Massachusetts furnished huge quantities of firearms to the Union Army. But social mores had changed.  The year that Michael Press sent his letters, New York passed the SAFE Act, one of the nation’s most stringent gun-control measures. Battle summarized to me the message the law sent to gunmakers: “If you like guns,” he said, “then you need to go somewhere else.”

There was a secondary benefit. Composed entirely of “right to work” states, the South allowed employees in unionized shops to opt out of paying dues, effectively guaranteeing that any union encountered by Remington would be worse-funded, and therefore less powerful, than a counterpart in the North. At Remington’s factory in Ilion, N.Y., employees had health care and long-term contracts thanks to the United Mine Workers of America. They were difficult to fire, and they stuck together. In some cases, multiple generations of men in the same family had worked on the line. “That union,” a former Remington executive told me disdainfully, “had them by the balls.”

[ … ]

In exchange for tens of millions in incentives, Remington had only to commit to a few terms, laid out in a fat document called a development agreement. First, it had to hire enough employees every year so that, in 2021, it would have a local work force of 1,868. Second, starting immediately, it had to pay those employees a minimum average hourly wage of $19.50, rising to $20.19 in 2017. All parties signed.

[ … ]

The dream was lofty and ambitious, and Huntsville was only a piece of it. Cerberus had been trying for years to assemble a dominant American gun company. First, in 2006, it purchased Bushmaster, known for its AR-15-style rifles. Then it paid $118 million in cash for Remington and assumed the company’s debt. Other acquisitions followed, until by 2013, 18 businesses were rolled up together under Cerberus’s roof. One of Kollitides’s jobs was to oversee the necessary layoffs. In Ilion, where Remington has operated for 191 years on the same site — unfinished weapons had to travel from one brick building to the next — 231 people lost their jobs.  There were 160 layoffs at Montana Rifleman in Kalispell, Mont. The Advanced Armament Corporation, a manufacturer of suppressors and silencers, closed its plant in Georgia, and 68 people were let go from D.P.M.S. Panther Arms in St. Cloud, Minn.; 65 from Para USA in Pineville, N.C. What remained was to increase profit margins by combining all these scattered production lines into a single megafactory.

[ … ]

There was, however, a hidden, vaguely mysterious quirk of the company’s finances. In 2012, more or less in the middle of the best climate for gun makers in a generation, America’s oldest continually operating manufacturer abruptly, and for no easily discernible reason, borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars. When the company came to Alabama, it owed $828 million to its creditors. While this number, compared with the company’s earnings, represented a comfortable ratio on the balance sheet, it was nonetheless curious. The debt could conceivably have been explained by the cost of opening a new factory were it not for the fact that Remington got its factory free.

[ … ]

He was hired, the executive explained, as the plant was coming online, and he was tasked with wrangling together some scattered acquisitions. The business was, according to him, “in shambles.” It seemed that the companies Cerberus had moved to Alabama had been “bought and forgot.” He explained that he was “a realist” about business, a game in which not everyone gets “a shiny rose at the end,” but even so he sensed that something had gone deeply wrong. Executives were fired at a fast clip. Line employees came and went. Parts piled up on the factory floor. Most worrying, Cerberus, which was trying to integrate disparate brands — the father-son pastoralism of Remington with the urban-militia aesthetic of AAC, for instance — seemed to him miserly when it came to marketing. “The decisions were all about: Where can I save another dime?” he told me.

Despite all this frenzy, he was certain that Cerberus had somehow made a great deal of money on Remington even before opening the Huntsville factory. According to him, Cerberus had made “hundreds of millions of dollars” almost immediately. “They pulled out all that money up front, took as much cash as they could.”

“How?” I said.

He squinted cryptically. “They get their money.”

I realized he didn’t know. I went back and reread Remington’s public filings. It was obvious when the debt appeared, in 2012. What wasn’t clear was where the money went. I showed the filings to a professor of finance. He said it looked as if Cerberus had wound up in debt to itself. “Seems like they did something stupid,” he said. “But that can’t be right, because they’re not stupid.”

I asked Gustavo Schwed, a professor of private equity at New York University who spent 24 years in the industry, to help me review the documents. Schwed pored over the many years of financial data and located two separate debt transactions, one of which was so esoteric I would never even have known to look for it. Together, these transactions explained not just the mysterious 2012 loan but, indirectly, the way the deal finally unraveled.

In order to buy Remington, Cerberus, as most private-equity firms would, created a new entity, a holding company. Instead of Cerberus buying a gun company, Cerberus put money into the holding company, and the holding company bought Remington. The entities were related but — and this was crucial — each could borrow money independently. In 2010, Cerberus had the holding company borrow $225 million from an undisclosed group of lenders, most likely hedge funds. Because this loan was risky — the lenders would be paid only if Remington made a lot of money or was sold — the holding company offered a generous interest rate of around 11 percent, much higher than a typical corporate loan.  When the interest payments were due, the holding company paid them not in cash but with paid-in-kind notes, that is, with more debt. These are known as PIK notes.

The holding company now had $225 million in borrowed cash. Cerberus, meanwhile, owned most of the shares of the holding company’s stock, basically slips of paper they acquired when they created the holding company. The handoff happened next: The holding company spent most of the $225 million buying back its own stock, effectively transferring all the borrowed cash to Cerberus. Cerberus would keep that money no matter what. Meanwhile Remington continued rolling along as though nothing had happened, because Remington itself was not responsible for the holding company’s debt.  Remington was just an “operating company” that the holding company owned, something that allowed the holding company to borrow money, the way you would take a necklace to a pawnshop. These were garden-variety maneuvers in a private-equity buyout. In the trade, this is called “financial engineering.” People get degrees in it.

In April 2012, Cerberus did something fateful, which probably seemed smart at the time. It had Remington borrow hundreds of millions of dollars and use it to buy the holding company’s debt, effectively transferring responsibility for the principal and the interest payments onto Remington. America’s oldest gun company now owed the money that Cerberus had used to pay itself back for having bought the company in the first place. There were plenty of sensible reasons to do this. Gun sales were high, and the debt that Remington took out was cheaper to service than the paid-in-kind debt.

But there was a catch. Because the operating company borrowed the money with a normal loan — and not with PIK notes — interest payments were required in cash. Suddenly Remington was carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that, if it could not be paid, would cause the business to go bankrupt.

By the time the factory opened in Huntsville, the various players stood in vastly different positions. The private-equity firm had made back its initial investment and was playing with house money. Remington owed hundreds of millions that it hadn’t borrowed. And its workers, urgently, had to make a lot of guns.

[ … ]

For Cerberus’s executives, the predicament was like being bitten by a trusted pet. Cerberus has a habit of hiring power brokers from the United States government, many of them prominent Republicans. The former vice president Dan Quayle became chairman of Cerberus Global Investments in 1999; the former Treasury secretary John W. Snow joined Cerberus seven years later. The Republican donor William Richter is a founder. Since May 2018, Feinberg has been a member of Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board, an independent entity created to advise the president on national-security matters. But if Obama was the best, Trump was proving to be the worst gun salesman of all time. Magnifying his negative impact, gun makers had already ramped up production ahead of Hillary Clinton’s expected victory: In 2017 the market was choked with surplus product, and Trump’s Second Amendment enthusiasm was dousing any hope of a panic buy.

Remington executives arranged a meeting with their creditors. They calmly explained the situation. Remington had been loaded with debt; now it couldn’t pay the interest. After listening politely, the banks made a proposal: They would exchange the money they were owed for an ownership stake in Remington, a so-called Chapter 11 bankruptcy or “debt-for-equity swap.” This arrangement would allow Remington to stay running, albeit under distant ownership, until a plan could be drawn up for its future, such as a sale or a liquidation of assets.

And that, folks, is how it’s done.  You hire the connected suits and elitists to the BOD, make shady deals, hide the debt, gamble on what’s going to happen in the future, and hope for the best.  When the best doesn’t happen, you shaft the working man, who has already shafted you by forming unions and making it too expensive to do business to begin with.

Because American has lost its soul.  It has exchanged the Puritan work ethic, the pride of working hard, making a good product or providing a needful service to others, and supporting your family through these means, for high stakes gambling where people get hurt and lives get ruined.

Gambling is a Luciferian project.  It’s wicked, because only God knows the future because He has decreed it.  He has ordered us not to engage in divination, prophesies, witchcraft, crystal balls, palm reading, tea leaves, astrology and other manner of superstition and paganism.  The Wall Street suits are just dressed up heathens with bones sticking through body parts, dancing around fires and bowing to totem poles.

It serves Ceberus right.  I’m sorry for the folks in Huntsville, Alabama.  They didn’t deserve this.

Update On Remington 700 Settlement

BY Herschel Smith
8 years, 11 months ago

CNBC:

The Montana man whose nearly 15-year search for answers about the death of his son paved the way for a nationwide class action settlement with the Remington Arms Co. says the gun maker still is not coming clean. So now, Richard Barber says he is launching a new push to “inform and educate the public” about one of the most popular firearms in the world, and his claim that the guns can fire without the trigger being pulled.

Barber’s 9-year-old son Gus was killed during a family hunting trip in 2000 when a Remington Model 700 rifle went off as the boy’s mother was unloading it. At the worst possible moment, Gus had run behind a horse trailer and into the path of the bullet. Barbara Barber has consistently maintained that her hand was nowhere near the trigger.

Richard Barber says he eventually found thousands of customer complaints and internal documents that suggest Remington had known for decades about an alleged design flaw in the gun’s firing mechanism but did nothing about it despite dozens of deaths and injuries. Allegations of the defect and a cover up—both of which Remington has steadfastly denied—were the subject of the 2010 documentary “Remington Under Fire: A CNBC Investigation.”

“The Model 700, including its trigger mechanism, has been free of any defect since it was first produced,” Remington told CNBC in 2010. “And, despite any careless reporting to the contrary, the gun’s use by millions of Americans has proven it to be a safe, trusted and reliable rifle.”

Last month, a federal judge in Missouri tentatively approved a nationwide settlement in which Remington agreed to replace the triggers on more than 7 million rifles equipped with what has become known as the Walker Fire Control—the same mechanism that was in the Barbers’ rifle. But the company still maintains the guns are safe, and has said it is settling the case to put an end to lengthy litigation. Barber says that stance is part of the reason he feels the need to speak out again.

“I wholeheartedly support the provisions in the class settlement in replacing the triggers,” Barber told CNBC in an interview Monday. As a result, he said, he will not formally object to the tentative settlement. Nonetheless, he said, “Remington’s statements (following the CNBC program in 2010) potentially constitute a fraud that not only endangered the public, but resulted in loss of life.”

Barber said he is concerned that Remington’s continued defense of the gun, as well as the company’s decision at the same time to launch a recall of a much smaller group of Model 700 rifles with a different firing mechanism, could either confuse customers or lull them into complacency.

“No deal is perfect,” he said, acknowledging that the company will likely never agree there is a problem.

“Nothing can force them to do that,” he said.

Remington is still denying any culpability, and Barber isn’t happy.  I told you so, and I told you so.  The most enlightening thing from the article is the comments.  This one is rich.

Once again if the gun wasn’t pointed horizontally this wouldn’t have happened. I can picture it completely. The mom like most women aren’t strong enough to hold the gun up or down while reloading it so she probably had it propped up on her leg with the gun pointing sideways and it went off.

And this one:

Basically comes down to the fact that the parents screwed up, they know it, and they are trying to blame someone else so they can sleep at night. I completely understand with such a tragic accident, but this is all this is about. They want to blame someone for their tragic mistake so they can feel better.

And finally, this:

Once somebody could repeat the condition of auto discharge of Model 700 that will proved the mechanism have a design flaw. But probably will be a lot of work to make it happen. Maybe a robot that will try all kind of positions for hours and hours will do it!

We’ve rehearsed the failures of the Walker fire control system before.  The reports are found here.  In this document, FSR and FOS is “fires when the safety is released,” and “fires on safe,” respectively.  The 700 does both.  There is no excuse for a single instance, ever.  EVER.  Not if the engineer is responsible and ethical and the management has moral fiber.

Is it the fault of the parents?  Yes.  Is it the fault of Remington?  Yes.  It isn’t either-or.  It is both-and.  It’s called defense in depth in firearms design and operation, and if you’re too stupid to understand this, you shouldn’t be posting comments to the internet.

Judge Questions Remington’s Rifle Fix

BY Herschel Smith
9 years, 2 months ago

CNBC:

The federal judge considering a proposed class-action settlement involving millions of allegedly defective Remington rifles is raising new questions about the accord, warning a plaintiff’s attorney in court that the agreement as it currently stands risks more people being injured by the guns.

Remington and the plaintiffs in two nationwide class-action cases have proposed replacing the triggers on nearly eight million guns, including the wildly popular Model 700 Series, which critics allege are prone to firing without the trigger being pulled.

Some two dozen deaths and hundreds of injuries have been linked to accidental firings of the guns. The 2010 documentary Remington Under Fire: A CNBC Investigation explored allegations that for more than 60 years, the company covered up the alleged defect.

Remington has steadfastly denied the allegations and still maintains the guns are safe.

“There’s nothing wrong with the Remington 700 rifle,” said Remington outside counsel John Sherk at a preliminary hearing in a federal court in Kansas City to consider the proposed settlement. But he said “Remington is committed to this settlement” in order for the company to move past litigation that has gone on for decades.

This is what happens with students go to law school and become convinced that it’s okay to tell lies.  There is indeed something very wrong with the Remington 700.  As I’ve said before, don’t believe what I’m saying.  Go study the evidence for yourself, including the testing performed at Remington.

The reason this is a big deal goes beyond mere responsibility for your work products as good and honest workers.  This goes to the honesty of engineering, the fidelity of weapons design and the ability to entrust your life and the lives of loved ones to a manufacturer.  Remington is showing itself to be a very bad example to the gun community.  Forget the issue of legal settlements.  What happened to being good professional engineers who take ownership of their designs?

Remington Arms: A Safe, Reliable And Trusted Rifle

BY Herschel Smith
9 years, 3 months ago

USA Today is carrying an editorial that has no apparent author (except perhaps Remington Arms).

For nearly 50 years, the Remington Model 700 rifle has been the preferred choice for millions of hunters, shooting sports enthusiasts and military and law enforcement personnel.

Despite emotional reporting of baseless and unproven allegations and plaintiff lawyer assertions, several undisputed facts remain:

The Model 700 is the most popular, reliable, accurate and trusted bolt-action rifle in the world, with over 5 million rifles produced and billions of rounds fired over nearly five decades.

The Model 700 is the firearm of choice for elite shooters from America’s military and law enforcement communities, and has been the platform for the United States Marine Corps and the U.S. Army precision sniper weapon systems for over two decades, both of which specifically require the “Walker” trigger mechanism.

The Model 700, including its trigger mechanism, has been free of any defect since it was first produced and, despite any careless reporting to the contrary, the gun’s use by millions of Americans has proven it to be a safe, trusted and reliable rifle.

Both Remington and experts hired by plaintiff attorneys have conducted testing on guns returned from the field which were alleged to have fired without a trigger pull, and neither has ever been able to duplicate such an event on guns which had been properly maintained and which had not been altered after sale.

Remington takes safety very seriously. We support hunter safety and other educational programs nationwide, and include with every Remington firearm the “Ten Commandments of Firearm Safety,” which urgently remind every gun owner that if proper firearms safety rules are followed, no accidental injuries would ever occur.

The men and women who build, own and shoot the Remington Model 700 take great pride in a product that, over the last half century, has set the bar for safety, reliability and performance.

I just don’t know how else to say it: this is false.  The evidence shows that numerous malfunctions occurred during internal Remington testing, from the firing pin moving forward during the bolt locking cycle to firing when the safety was moved to the “off” position.

As I’ve said before as a registered professional engineer, if I designed a machine that had such malfunctions I would immediately demand “stop work” on the manufacture of the machine until I understood what exactly had happened in the design or manufacture to cause the malfunctions.  Only when those problems had been corrected would I have allowed manufacture to continue.

I wouldn’t do this because I fear retribution from customers, or neglect to do it because I fear retribution from the employer.  I would do this because it is the right thing to do, because it is the ethical thing to do, and because I swore an oath to protect the safety and health of the public in order to be granted my license to practice engineering.  There are things more important than money.

Remington didn’t do any of this, but rather, fought it all the way through the process, even ignoring their own internal reports and concerns of their testing engineers.  Don’t take my word for it.  Go read the evidence for yourself.  In my estimation, Remington is suffering for their ethical failures even as I write.  And I don’t understand why Remington is still trying to rewrite the history of the Model 700.  This is just befuddling.


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