Nobody....as in not a single person or company concerned with liability buys back every one of their rifles if there wasnt a significant design or material failure. I am willing to bet that there is a high point of failure in the design that was known to the attorneys and accountants. Realizing this they recalled every single rifle, stopped production and closed down the shop until they could sell the patterns and designs to somebody that would work out the issues. Every single retrieved rifle was cut into small pieces......
In the mid 70's there was little anti gun reasons to worry about liability, there was HUGE product failure as this is where attorney's focused their attention
I spoke to Homer Koon in 1984 and he told me himself that the rifles he made in Flower Mound were rounded up using the order list he had. According to him all but nine were retrieved and their destruction was reported to the BATF at the time. There was NOTHING WRONG with these rifles, but with the THINKING of the people who backed him with cash to make it possible to have the production run he wanted.
There was an incident in 1970 involving an imported revolver, an RG 44mag, made in Germany. The owner HANDLOADED some shells to the MAX and blew part of his hand off. He sued the IMPORTER, and the anti gun judge sided with him and he won enough to put them out of business. This was the reason for the worry of a liability lawsuit that COULD run into the millions(a lot at the time).
Mr Koon said that when this happened, is pretty much smashed his dreams of firearms manufacturing and he felt betrayed. He also told me that there were some special presentation rifles made and each one got special numbers and special work. S1 was given to John Wayne, S2 to John Connally and S10 to a good friend of his that had backed him financially. I have seen S1 and S2 in museums and admired the gold inlays, etc. I have seen S10 and it looks like a regular production rifle except for the fact that is was never testfired, has a two tone red/blue finish, a silver grip cap with a gold "B" inlaid, and the special S serial number. I has a laminated stock and is chambered in .270 Win at the request of the recipient, who never fired it and let it sit in a gunsafe until his death in the early 1980's. I do not know who recieved S3-S9 or what happened to them, I would guess they were destroyed.
I saw a production Omega III in a gunshop in Kansas that was missing the bolt, but do not recall the serial other than is was three digit beginning with a 1, such as 189.
I see posts pop up on the web every few months about these rifles and every time, this SAME argument comes up...what are they worth? Who knows for sure, but I guarantee they are NOT going DOWN in value. I met a guy at a Dallas gun show who had three sitting on his table and calimed to have another at home and at teh time they were priced between $1000-2500, but none had the original scope and rings on them. From the production line, they came with Leupold VariX II scopes mounted with ConeTrol rings and bases. Other than S1-S2-S10, I have never seen an Omega III with the original scope and rings still on it, so that could also bear on the pricing.
Guns and Ammo magazine did a review on these rifles in 1970, then revived the story in 1984 and reviewed the test and said that most people have never heard of, musch less have seen one of these rifles. If you get a chance to check one out, do so.
If Homer Koons' son can search out the people who worked with Homer at the time, perhaps he can find more information, unless he was old enough to actually have been there at the time and can give us firsthand information.
