(She hesitated to write the company until the rifle discharged by itself a second time.)Īttorneys for injured sportsmen and other families who lost members to misfiring Remington rifles would eventually bring 75 different lawsuits against the company, which had settled or rebuffed many of those and other claims for as little as $5,000 before the Barbers’ class action settlement offer was made two years ago. A North Carolina woman complained to the gunmaker in 1987 that her rifle, stowed in the front seat of her Jeep, fired when her neighbor kicked the vehicle’s tire. In 1994, a Texas jury ordered Remington to pay $17 million to Glenn Collins, a Texas oil executive whose rifle fired into his foot while he was unloading it, leading to an amputation. Similar stories revolved around the model 700 for decades. “I told him that I would never be bought and that I would never quit.” “I promised Gus that day that this was going to end here and now,” Richard Barber told the Billings Gazette in 2011. With her fingers off the trigger, she said, the gun discharged, killing Gus.īarbara and Gus’s father, Richard, decided to take legal action after their son’s funeral.
The muzzle was pointed at an empty horse trailer, but Barbara didn’t realize that Gus had chosen that moment to run to the other side of the trailer, where he wasn’t visible. The family had just wrapped up a hunting trip in the Gravelly Mountains when Barbara Barber attempted to unload her Model 700. The key impetus for CNBC’s investigation and the class action was the accidental shooting death of a 9-year-old Montana boy, Gus Barber, by his mother in 2000. A 2010 investigation by CNBC showed that the weapons could potentially fire without a pull of the trigger, a fault in the mechanism that the network said resulted in two dozen deaths and more than 100 injuries. More than 7.5 million of the rifles and related Remington firearms were sold between 19.
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If the court rejects the settlement, the class action could take Remington to trial.Īt issue are design flaws in the venerable Remington Model 700 series of bolt-action rifles, a favorite among hunters and target shooters, and a longtime pattern for police and military sniper rifles. “That is a very small payment for Remington in this case.” “If the settlement is approved, Remington is absolved of close to half a billion dollars in potential liability…at a cost of less than $3 million,” Smith told representatives of both parties in court. But he also voiced concerns over how few gun owners - only about 22,000 as of this week - were taking Remington up on its replacement offer, and how low a financial penalty the rifle-maker might realize from the settlement. District Judge Ortrie Smith of the Western District of Missouri promised on Tuesday that he would rule on the unprecedented settlement in the next 30 days. Critics, including 10 state attorneys general, say that’s not good enough. Under the terms of the settlement, Remington is offering to replace millions of the guns’ trigger assemblies without admitting wrongdoing. The defects left some of the firearms prone to dangerous accidental discharges. The offer is the result of allegations that the nation’s oldest gunmaker had knowingly installed faulty trigger mechanisms in its most popular rifles for more than 40 years. A federal judge in Kansas City expressed deep skepticism on Tuesday about whether he will approve a multi-million-dollar settlement offer in a class-action lawsuit against Remington Arms.
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