❘ ❘.
I
t started with an offhand comment.
A group of us from
Publications
was meeting with personnel from
Remington Arms at
Show
to discuss new-product introductions for
the coming year, coverage past, present
and future, and advertising—same as we
do every year not only with Remington
but other companies as well. Indeed, this
is how folks like us know about new prod-
ucts long before the general public.
Remington personnel kept returning to
a couple of pet projects they’d completed
the prior year. They were quite proud of
one of them, a semi-custom rifle aimed at
sheep hunters. I said, “We can do that.”
Thus began a year-long project the
likes of which I had dreamed of since
joining American Hunter in , when
it seemed as if knife, pack, clothing and
cartridge designs were regularly named
after outdoor brands or outdoor writ-
ers. However, I don’t recall such leverage
applied to a firearm—not one instance.
We met again that spring at the
Annual Meetings & Exhibits in Dallas to
begin deliberations. We aimed for not so
much as a niche, a rifle for sheep hunters,
but for a wide spectrum, a rifle for every-
one reading this. Indeed, the gun would
be a rifle; we couldn’t think of anything
else we’d rather do than design a rifle for
big-game hunters.
Naturally, any rifle associated with
a brand like American Hunter actually
needs to be built in America ... and con-
sidering our partner in this endeavor, it
didn’t take long to settle on the Model
. It was introduced by Remington
in and today, years later, it is
perhaps the most popular bolt-action
rifle on Earth, used not only by hunters
the world over but by police and mili-
tary personnel, by competitors and by
custom gunsmiths as the platform for
all manner of creations.So the nomenclature took care of
itself: We would call it the Remington
Model American Hunter. (Actually,
this took dedicated effort throughout
the project. Many folks on “both sides
of the aisle kept conjuring names that
usually included adjectives like “ulti-
mate.” I eschewed them all, reminding
everyone of an acronym: . Keep it
simple, stupid.)
If it would be a general-purpose big-
game rifle it needed to be practical, we
insisted. staff took careful stock of
current trends and assembled a short
list of characteristics. The rifle should be
chambered in a popular cartridge suit-
able for taking most big game of North
America out to a maximum effective
range of yards. Not everyone wants
or is comfortable shooting a magnum,
after all, but not everyone wants or needs
another ’ , either. It should be a practi-
cal rifle. That is, it should be lightweight,The Making of the
Remington Model
American Hunter
By J. Scott Olmsted, Editor in Chiefguns&shooting