Emcon, I have to disagree with you about the Walker trigger, but agree with you that people and not the trigger have caused the fatalities. If the engineer of the trigger said there was a problem with it,(which he did) the company had legal and moral obligations to correct the problem. Having said that, it has been my experience that the Win. mod 70 has the trigger that is prone to A.D., not Remington.
The whole interview on the CNBC hit-piece, all Walker really said was he advocated for a firing pin block on the safety, and Remington did not do it because of cost.
There were three memos CNBC and the plaintiffs proclaim are a smoking gun about the "Unsafe" Walker trigger.
CNBC said:
"his own memos, obtained by CNBC show he repeatedly raised concerns about the guns he designed"
Well, not exactly. They showed 3 memos from when he worked at Remington, all are posted online.
The first advocates adding a trigger block to the safety, and what that would involve, in the manufacturing process:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Se...Remington_Under_Fire/Documents/Rem_Doc_09.pdf
They also say that the cost would be 5 1/2 cents per gun, which is certainly minimal, but unit cost and the cost of making the change are not the same thing. They do not mention tooling and setup costs, and depending on where they were in the design/manufacturing process, this could be a substantial setup cost.
I agree that a trigger block is a good thing to have on a safety, but that does not mean that a safety without a trigger block is unsafe. The Mauser 98 does not have a trigger block.
The memo they show like it is some sort of smoking gun:
CNBC said:
As early as 1946, with the gun still in the testing stage, Walker writes about a theoretical unsafe condition involving the safety
The memo they show in the piece is here:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Se...Remington_Under_Fire/Documents/Rem_Doc_02.pdf
Yeah, he did. Which HE FIXED. The last line of the memo says "this change will be incorporated in the drawing as soon as tool procurement is completed" Now why wouldn't they mention that?
The third they show in the "he repeatedly..." section isn't even from Walker, it is signed by a guy named Leek, and all it says is some parts were out of "out of design limits".
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Se...Remington_Under_Fire/Documents/Rem_Doc_03.pdf
It does not say the out of design parts were used, or what was done with the information.
Again, I am not saying there isn't a problem, I am just saying that the evidence provided as "proof" is suspect at best, and downright misleading in some cases. I believe the biggest problem with the Walker Trigger is any nitwit with a small screwdriver can monkey with them to the point they can go off if you look at them funny.