super hunt 54---Nobody, including myself, has ever argued with your statement on proper gun handling. Let's leave that out and strictly discuss the rifles themselves. What I have a problem with is that as early as December 3, 1946, with the guns still in the testing stage, lead engineer Merle “Mike” Walker, who later received a patent for the 700 series trigger, wrote a memo warning of a “theoretical unsafe condition” involving the gun’s safety that is supposed to keep the gun from firing accidentally and he, therefore, asked that a trigger block be installed to eliminate the problem. Four months later in an April 9, 1947 memo entitled “M/721 Pilot Line Inspection,”Test Engineer Wayne Leek wrote: “This situation can be very dangerous from a safety and functional point of view.” Among other things, Leek stated it was “possible to fire the gun by pushing the safety to the ‘off’ position.” That same malfunction, in which the gun fires when the safety is turned off, is cited in many of the customer complaints that persist to this day. These guys were talking about rifles that had never left the factory or been touched by customers and are the designer and engineer intricately involved with the original mechanism which came to be known as the Walker "Fire Control" trigger. Top brass in other memos ruled that the rifles would be produced without the trigger block because of cost overruns even though we're only talking about 5 1/2 cents per rifle and the reason was that their calculations were such that the percentage of rifles where that would occur would be very minimal! Now people continue to argue over decades of many accidents that none of this is happening other than by customer error, etc. That is why I get so upset when people won't look at the facts stated in these memos that are right out of the Remington files when they discuss this situation.