The gun company that made the AR-15-style rifle used to kill 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in 2016 and another four at an Indiana mall this month is now gearing up to mass-produce an even more lethal weapon of war for the civilian market.
SIG Sauer’s new MCX-SPEAR fires bullets with twice the kinetic energy of those from an AR-15. That means double the horrifying force that mangled the victims of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and left one youngster essentially decapitated.
“It’ll shoot through almost all of the bulletproof vests that are worn by law enforcement in the county right now,” said Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive who is now a senior policy analyst with the Giffords Law Center and author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America.
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The MCX-SPEAR is the civilian version of the U.S. Army’s NGSW-R (Next Generation Squad Weapon-Rifle), which was created with the express purpose of tearing through enemy body armor.
“This is a weapon that could defeat any body armor, any planned body armor that we know of in the future,” then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told the Army Times in 2019. “This is a weapon that can go out at ranges that are unknown today.”
Milley had in mind the body armor worn by Russian and Chinese troops. The Army just shrugged when asked this week whether the same could apply to that worn by cops.
“Please, refer your question to Sig Sauer and civilian law enforcement agencies,” a spokesperson for the Army Modernization Team told The Daily Beast.
The country’s police unions are either unaware of the potential threat or blinded by politics. Requests for comment from The Daily Beast brought no response from the unions representing cops in Los Angeles, Chicago, and even Dallas—where five officers were killed with an assault weapon in 2016.
Not a word of protest came after the Firearm Blog reported in January and SIG Sauer confirmed online that a “First Production Run Special Edition” of the MCX-SPEAR was available at “select dealers“ with a manufacturer’s suggested retail of $7,999.
“SIG SAUER is proud to announce the official expansion of the MCX series of rifles,” the company’s website said. “The MCX-SPEAR was developed with direct input from U.S. warfighters to provide more power, distance, and accuracy… The MCX-SPEAR is now the most innovative and advanced AR platform in the world.
The site quoted SIG Sauer President & CEO Ron Cohen saying the civilian weapon was a “near match” to what would become the military’s new standard infantry weapon.
“This is a rare opportunity for passionate consumers to own a piece of history,” Cohen said. “This first production run MCX-SPEAR, and all of the revolutionary technology behind its development, is being offered to the commercial market in a configuration that is a near match to our NGSW-R submission.”
One of the “elite” dealers estimated this week that SIG Sauer had sent out between 2,500 and 5,000 of the weapons—and that they were an instant hit despite the price.
“What’s out there is already bought out,” he reported.
SIG Sauer did not respond to a request for comment. A customer service representative said that many more of the MCX-SPEAR would soon be shipped to the nation’s gun stores at a much lower price than the “collector’s items” of the “first edition.”
“I know it's coming,.” the representative said. “We’re trying to get these things out as fast as we can… Get as many guns as we can out the door.”
Busse told The Daily Beast that the AR-15 is lighter and more maneuverable than the MCX-SPEAR and therefore might be more effective from a mass shooter’s point of view in an enclosed area such as a classroom. But the bullet fired by the MCX-SPEAR hits much harder over much greater distances, making it akin to a sniper rifle that can be fired at a rapid rate.
And Busse worries that mass shooters might follow a recent trend among sporting shooters.
“There’s been this huge craze in shooting competitions to become a thousand-yard sniper,” Busse said. “A lot of people want to be that long-range, thousand-yard sniper. Like they literally fantasize about taking some guy out from a mile away, because the gun will shoot a mile. You don’t hear it coming, you don’t see the shooter. The bullet just hits somebody. And this MCX Spear will essentially introduce that kind of capability to the semi-auto AR-15 world. All of a sudden, people will be able to kind of live out their fantasy of becoming a long-range sniper with an AR-15-style gun.”
Busse was not surprised that SIG Sauer is marketing the civilian version of the gun, since making weapons only for the military results in small profit margins and big headaches.
“There’s all these military requirements,” Busse said. “You gotta ship at the right time. Everything’s gotta be double and triple-checked. It’s a pain for companies to do that. What’s very profitable for them is to sell that gun to the U.S. consumers. Consumers don’t demand the sort of on-time deliveries and all the other expensive stuff that the military does.”
But in selling to civilians, SIG plays up the military connection.
“That’s a major part of SIG’s advertising, their whole thing,” Busse said. “They don’t have a lot of words in their advertising, but they picture all of these, either military guys or special forces officers,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Buy the gun that all the military special operators use…forget basic training, just become a military badass.”
Regarding some of the supposedly sane ones, he noted, “A lot of people just wanna be Billy Badass. This kinda allows them to be that.”
The question is what might happen when a weapon such as the MCX Spear gets in the hands of somebody who is just plain bad, or at least so nuts as to act out the fantasy. The shooter who killed seven parade-goers with an AR-15 from a rooftop in Highland Park on the Fourth of July might have committed worse carnage from further away with an MCX Spear, which even comes with a noise suppressor that makes a sniper harder to locate.
It is worth noting that the first modern mass shooting was a sniper who killed 14 in 96 minutes with a bolt-action rifle from a tower at the University of Texas in 1966. Somebody with a semi-automatic MCX Spear could kill that many in a fraction of the time at an even greater distance.
“I can’t predict what a trend will be, but I can tell you this gun gives them the capability to do it,” Busse told The Daily Beast.
And if a cop gets in the way, the civilian version can blast through his body armor just as the military version is designed to take out an enemy.
