The thing that the Remington apologists here don’t understand is that a designer has to anticipate possible failure modes (ways the item can be damaged) in his design, and try to make the failure modes fail safely. AKA (fail safe) As in, when the item has a mechanical malfunction, it will result in a non dangerous situation. The failure modes that should be obvious to the designer is dirt, water, rust, and other environmental contaminates, and their effects on equipment over the years.
When they designed the 700 trigger, they obviously did not think that little detail through.
Most guns rely on a trigger based safety restraint. It will impinge the trigger there by making the movement of that trigger impossible. It does not interfere with the hammer or other movement on down the line. If the trigger will not hold the hammer back, then the unit will never stayed in the cocked position, safety on, or off. Like the savage. The safety will not even engage if the trigger is not in the locked position. If the trigger system is rusted to the point it won’t fully engage the sear, then you can’t engage the safety in the first place. So the possibility of using the safety as a trigger is zero no mater what rust is on the trigger system, or dirt in the system.
On the rem 700 the design is such that the safety can hold the hammer in the firing position even if the trigger is unable to. That creates the condition where the safety can become an effective trigger when the trigger is even slightly contaminated, or damaged from the elements.
The reason they had to go with that type of safety on the 700 in the first place was because they could not rely on a simple trigger safety to prevent the gun from firing during normal drops, mishandling, or trigger damage. That is because there is no way to “positively lock” all the trigger elements in place to withstand drops, or mishandling while the safety was on. SO they had to have one that impinged the striker system directly to achieve a safety that made it impossible for the gun to fire when the safety was on..
Thus, creates the situation where the safety is the only thing holding the striker back after a normal drop, mishandling, or trigger damage. Thus, when you disengage the last thing holding that striker, then the gun will fire.
AKA… A seriously flawed design.
Oh, I agree that the Walker Fire Control System is a flawed design. No quibble there.
The crux of the matter in Remington’s case is money. They went with the WFCS design because it allows them to harden the connector (a little strip of bent steel that rides in front of the trigger) apart from the main trigger bar. This is the same reason why, on the Rem 700, they have a bolt that is made from soldering three pieces together: The main bolt body, the handle and the forward part of the bolt where the lugs are. They did this so that they could heat treat the part with the lugs and not have to deal with heat treatment on the rest of the bolt. There are many bolts made from a single-piece bolt (with the lugs) and a handle is welded or soldered on, but Remington is the only one I know of where they chose to get so damned cheap about their heat treatment that they’d break the main part of the bolt into two pieces, heat treat only one and then silver solder them together. In every aspect on most all their products, Remington looks to cut costs to the bone. Appearance and quality be damned. There’s a reason why I own only one Remington rifle and nothing else from them.
At TSJC they warned us loud and long about Rem 700 triggers and their failure mechanisms, and to never set them under about 4 pounds, for reasons of protecting one’s self against liability. If you want to set some other type of trigger to 3.5 or whatever, OK, but the Rem700 original trigger is a lawsuit just waiting to happen - and has happened to Remington, several times in the last 20 years. They’ve paid off millions of bucks for this exact type of failure - i.e., failure of the connector to return with the trigger, the safety is what is holding the pin in a cocked position, drop the safety and the pin fires. The problem only gets worse when the trigger pull weight spring (which pushes back on the face of the connector) is set to a light weight. If someone wants a 1 to 2 lb. trigger in a Rem 700, they really need to get an aftermarket trigger.
The best way to see what is going on here is to look at the patent drawings:
See Fig 1. The connector is item # 39. It just floats on the front of the trigger, item #40, held in place there by the spring item #42. If there is rust, dirt, gummed up lube in between the two side-plates of the trigger group, the connector can be pushed forward by a trigger pull, and the gunk puts enough friction on the connector that it can overcome the spring pressure (from item #42), which leaves the connector off of the trigger. Now you’re set for a firing from letting off the safety.
This would especially happen because you used to be able to pull the Rem700 trigger with the safety on, and this, as you point out, is a rather large fault in the design. Safety on, pull trigger, connector doesn’t come back, and you have NO CLUE that it didn’t come back, flick off safety and rifle fires.
In this case, the owner was at least smart enough to check the rifle without ammo.
In Mike Walker’s defense, he suggested a fix to this issue to Remington years and years ago, but Remington never took his suggestion.