Or perhaps Toby's change of heart is akin to the pilot who survives a plane crash and never flys again, denouncing human flight as unsafe. Even if some part of the plane failed causing the crash doesn't mean that all aircraft of that type are dangerous. And lets not discount "pilot error."

Bridges was intentionally overloading the gun, and admits it. Like the saying goes, "if you play with fire, sooner or later you're going to be burned." He regularly played with fire by pushing the gun beyond its limits, and he got burned. Thankfully it didn't cause him serious injury or death. I'd bet that if someone regularly and intentionally shot 200+ grains of T7 in their BPI ML they'd blow it up too, but that wouldn't mean that the gun was unsafe with a recommended 100gr load.

People are quick to accept the explanation that the blown up Winchester (BPI) was due to a defective gun, and it may well have been. Has anyone considered that the Savage in question was made with a defect that went undetected in the proofing process. A tiny microfracture of the steel in the barrel, after hundreds of shots, many of which were overloaded, could have turned the minor defect into what we see in those pictures.

I guess my point is that there is insufficient evidence to indicate that the Savage 10ML is unsafe because of four reports of failure, at least two of which involved the shooter intentionally loading the gun with powders or powder quantities in not recommended in the manual and proven safe. The other two failures are of unknown cause. So we have four reported failures, two of which were partially or completely the fault of the shooters and two that are unsubstanciated reports where the cause is unknown. Yet Savage has made and sold THOUSANDS of 10ML's in the 5 years since they were introduced. That being the case the catastrophic failure rate from all causes (human and otherwise) is well under 1%, and more likely around 0.1% or less. Toby himself states he's fired more than 35,000 shots with an 10ML and smokeless powder. One failure out of 35,000 shots fired works out to 0.0029%. Sounds pretty safe to me.

I would also like to know just how much bad blood there is no between Bridges and Savage. That might also have something to do with his change of tune.

Mike