REMINGTON FILES FOR CHAPTER 11

by Bob Walsh

Remington, a very respectable American arms manufacturer, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Many of the people who follow such things believe that their downfall was caused by a number of things, including a huge lessening of quality control and over-expansion in buying out other makers, such as Marlin, whose products also dropped markedly in quality as a result. It seems that once a firearms company starts being run exclusively by lawyers and marketing people rather than gun people this sort of thing happens. You need SOME non-gun people just to make sure you business runs as a business. That being said you have to make a decent product or people will pretty soon quit buying, even if you do have an outstanding brand name.

They were also hit badly when their new/old 9mm pistol had MASSIVE problems and had to be completely recalled. Allegedly the pistol worked beautifully in pre-production but between that stage and final retail production things were changed without adequate further testing, resulting in a completely unreliable product. Unreliable handguns do not tend to sell well.

In addition they caught a lot of heat after a major expose by a TV news magazine asserting that their Remington 700 rifles, used by many SWAT precision marksmen in the U. S., had an inherent flaw that could cause them to fire unintentionally.