I'm not going to get into the war stories I've heard on the net. I will say I have owned around 25 M700 hunting rifles. Early on, I had a gunsmith show me how to correctly adjust the trigger and every rifle I've owned since then I have adjusted myself to a crisp 3.5#. I have never had a misfire, nor a mis-function. As a guess, I'm gonna suggest that a lot of the problems stem from the triggers being bubba-ized or being set with too light a trigger pull.
My war story is pretty straight forward. I had bought a new 22-250 in 700 and since it was going to be a varmint rifle, it wasn't going to be carried loaded, in fact, it would be shot single fire only. So I adjusted the trigger to a crisp 32ozs. I put the rifle on safe, pulled the trigger, took the safety off and nothing happened. I bounced the rifle sharply on the floor with the safety off and nothing happened.
My friend came over that evening to look at it. I handed him the rifle, he cycled the action to make sure it was empty and then I told him to check out the trigger. When he pushed the safety forward, we heard a loud click. You can imagine how loud that sounded in the stillness of my shop. To make a long story short, when I shoot I don't touch the trigger until I'm ready. My friend was one of those that keeps his finger curled around the trigger. We found that when he would push the safety forward, his trigger finger would make a involuntary movement. Enough to pull the lightly adjusted trigger. Even knowing what was happening, he could not hold his trigger finger still enough to keep the trigger from activating the firing pin.
Anything mechanical can break or fail --how many cars does GM have on recall?-- so you just can't make an assumption that because it worked last time, it's gonna work this time. So safe gun handling trumps all.
