I've probably owned close to 100 rifles in the Remington 700 family over the past 50 years, still have 55, and have never had a problem with any of them. A small percentage of a very large number may be a meaningful number to some people, but it remains a very small percentage of the entire production run. Remington may look at their error rate and after comparing that number to the number of 700s produced, find that the error rate is too small to be worth fixing. I would assume that cost to benefit analysis is taught in operations 101 in every MBA program in America.
The correct cost-benefit analysis is a few cents per rifle versus many cents per rifle. Assume 5 million M700s manufactured and 5 cents to fix the problem. That comes to $250,000 over the life of the product so far. Add $50,000 for every additional 1 million rifles produced.
Now consider the payouts for the lawsuits, the cost of lawyers, the increased cost of liability insurance and lost sales due to bad publicity. That cost will easily be in the multiple million$ and I suspect is in the ten$ of million$.
When Walker warned of the problem and provided a solution, Remington should have listened.
