I just have to interject here, a production rifle of Remington's stature should be able to be used, abused, and fired most continuosly until it dies from never being cleaned and a misfire when releasing a safety on rifle, touching the bolt, or any other move not related to directly pulling the trigger should NEVER cause the gun to go off.
I'm sorry, most of the other big companies seem to have done that and so should Remington have. It doesn't even make sense to defend a company that of their own conscious free choice related to economics chose to defend a bad position and quietly pay out gag order attached settlements rather than bite the bullet and fix the friggin thing.
I had a bird food business, I chose to address the occassional bad batch product liability with recalls and replacement (it happens occassionally). Most of my competitors found it cheaper to field complaints and liability as it came in. Customer loses $50k worth of birds, you turn it to your insurance company who settles at $35k and binds the person with a gag order that makes them liable for hundreds of thousands in liability if they ever divulge any detail of the case or settlement.
It was costly replacing product but not that bad, a single bad lawsuit judgement can amount to the total cost of fixing a problem as evidenced by the $17 million paid out in one suit. Had Remington aggressively addressed their problem when memos first made them aware the guy that won the $17 million would never have gotten hurt. And you know why he got that much? He was an oil executive with huge money and decided to push it to the max, the others typically don't have the resources so they get chump change settlements.
Had Remington had my attitude about fixing problems versus holding out and playing turtle lives would have been saved, if it was on your watch that a rifle misfired and it killed your wife or kid through a wall you would want blood too.
Don't defend the actions of CEO's who made bad decisions. It's impossible to make too big a deal out of this.
Warbirdlover
The problem was more like injection mold marks that act as interference than dirt, this possibly lets dirt and debris get into the mechanism better. But that said a rifle prone to doing it will do it when new. Don't assume this is only cases of dirty, abused, and tampered with rifles, that remington's defense spin and they do have to spin one, don't they?
That's the only position they can take and they have to hope that a lot of people who haven't had it happen to them buy it, because the victim's sure aren't.