Remington did have a recall and design change on the bolt/safety a few years ago. I took mine to local gunsmith and the fix was done. Prior to the fix you had to take the safety off to unload the magazine by using the bolt to eject shells. Now you are able to leave the safety on and work the bolt to empty the chamber and magazine.
Michael:
I don't know who is right about a trigger mechanism recall, but here is a quote from one of the CNBC articles:
Remington came closest to launching a recall in 2002, as part of a settlement with the family of Gus Barber, the nine-year-old Montana boy killed when his mother’s Remington 700 went off. Twenty years earlier, in 1982, Remington had done away with the feature that required the user to switch off the safety in order to unload the gun—a common source of inadvertent discharges, including the one that killed Gus Barber. But Remington had not publicized the change, so customers like Barbara Barber were unaware that an alternative mechanism was available.
Under the settlement, Remington agreed to launch a “safety modification program”—the company stopped short of calling it a recall—allowing owners of pre-1982 Remingtons to have their rifles modified, for a $20 fee, so the gun could be unloaded with the safety on.
“The Barber family knows it has our deepest sympathy,” Remington said in its
press release.
The company would not actually change the firing mechanism until 2007, and even then, it did not institute a recall of the Walker trigger models it had been selling for nearly 60 years.
Remington calls the new trigger system the X-Mark Pro. Plaintiffs’ experts who have examined it say the system includes the blocking mechanism originally proposed by Mike Walker (Remington design engineer - WDK) in 1948. The X-Mark Pro also does away with the controversial trigger connector. A source close to Remington confirms the trigger connector was removed because it had become the focus of so many lawsuits.
But because Remington still contends the old Walker trigger is safe, it continues to use it in rifles including the current version of the Remington 770, as well as earlier 700 series models still sold by retailers worldwide.