The Remington 700 and Me

After reading about the trigger problems with the Remington 700, before the CNBC brouhaha, I went out and bought a Remington 700 SPS Tactical. I was confident the gunmaker had addressed a trigger design defect more than two-and-a-half decades ago. No, that’s not it. I didn’t buy the Remington 700 because it wasn’t defective. I bought it because it’s what I want: a reasonably priced 308 rifle for target practice. In bad ass black. If SWAT teams and military special ops trust the post-1982 Remington 700 to save the lives of innocent people, that’s good enough for me. OK, they deploy the Remington M-24 Sniper Weapon System based on the 700. But still. Which brings me to my main point: why is Remington attacking CNBC’s reporter instead of defending their gun?

Remington’s attack video is a huge miscalculation. Yes, reporters are lying scumbags. Yes, Remington got sandbagged by a journalist who didn’t know enough to keep his finger off the trigger of a gun—whilst kvetching about the 700’s safety, no less. But really, this isn’t about media bias and “agenda driven journalism.” It’s about a gun.

All Remington has to do to manage this crisis: tell existing and potential customers that the 700 is safe. Instead, their response video repeats CNBC’s claim. How dumb is that? I mean, there may be people who didn’t know about the CNBC report. Why decrease that population?

The video also assumes that showing the reporter to be a putz is enough to convince people that he’s wrong. Wrong. Even a putz can be right. The big question: is he? Address the damn issue guys. Or, not to coin a phrase, don’t shoot the messenger. Show how the gun is safe, how it can’t fire accidentally. Done.

I bought a Remington 700. I know: I should have waited until this media-driven stink became a toxic cloud, and then purchased the weapon at a discount. Contrarian that I am, I wanted to do the right thing. It’s too bad Remington doesn’t know what that means.