There is a study of the failure rate of low-number Spingfields. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MNn-sVcfW2AJ:m1903.com/03rcvrfail/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b It seems to be very low.

I seem to recall that the fellow shooting the Meunier that blew up was using a low pressure round with a cast bullet, but this forum's search engine does not work very well.