It was easy to miss (as we did) SIG SAUER’s announcement of an update to their entry-level AR platform rifle, the M400 TREAD. SIG rolled it out smack-dab in the middle of the SHOT Show, an event the company didn’t attend this year.
As SIG tweeted at the time . . .
The M400 TREAD features a free-floating M-LOK enhanced handguard, an ambidextrous safety and an integrated QD mount for easy sling attachment. Chambered in 5.56 NATO, the M400 TREAD has a 16” stainless steel barrel for extreme durability and accuracy, and is fitted with a 3-prong flash hider. Featuring a mid-length gas system, the M400 TREAD includes a SIG Matchlite 2-stage trigger along with a MAGPUL SL-K telescoping stock.
Good features for a base-level AR-15…guns that tens of millions of people own and lots more buy every single day. Exactly the kind of “modern musket,” if you will, that every gun owner should have (at least one of) in their safe.
It its marketing of the new M400 TREAD, SIG frames their version of America’s favorite rifle in historical terms, calling it “the new face of freedom” and juxtaposing images of an 18th century minute man and a 21st century everyman.
SIG put together an effective 60-second video spot evoking the birth of the nation and a coming together of the colonies in a fight against tyranny. It’s exactly the kind of marketing that drives our friends in the gun control industry crazy(er). You might even think they did that on purpose.
Here’s the ad’s script . . .
As Americans, we have always despised tyranny. Our freedoms, cast on an altar of sacrifice, were born from a desire to unite. Those freedoms have been challenged before, yet they have stood the test of time.
Today, our freedom is once again in question and its future is not promised. To those who may deny and restrict those freedoms, we say only this: shall…not…be…infringed.
Nothing too controversial there…unless, of course, you run a billionaire-financed gun control operation and have a vested interest in demonizing exactly these kinds of guns, the people who own them, and actively work to ban their sale and possession.
In recent years, the gun control industry has worked increasingly hard to associate virtually any kind of gun ownership as extremist, inherently violent, and downright insurrectionary. Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown didn’t miss the opportunity to highlight the horrifying imagery of a modern gun owner standing up for his rights and painting it as some kind of danger to peace, civility, and democracy itself.
As Everytown wrote at their Smoking Gun agitprop outlet . . .
Sig Sauer’s ad juxtaposes colonial Minutemen with a modern homeowner holding an AR-15 and a voiceover that states, “Our freedoms…have been challenged before, yet they have stood the test of time. Today, our freedom is once again in question, and its future is not promised.” The comparison clearly evokes armed civil conflict: Americans believe that revolution against British tyranny was warranted, and the ad not only suggests that there exists a similar threat of tyranny today that requires an armed response, but offers a Sig Sauer AR-15 as the tool for that response to tyranny.
Many on the far right have long used the imagery and aesthetics of the American Revolution to justify their extremist beliefs, and the Sig Sauer ad also features images of the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” and Gonzales “Come and Take It” flags, popular today with extremists. …
The new rifle unveiled in the ad is part of Sig Sauer’s “M400 Tread” series, which the company has marketed with the Gadsden flag in the past, but never in such an incendiary fashion. Sig Sauer states that the rifle represents “All of the freedom, all of the features, with none of the compromises.”
Pardon us while we clutch our pearls and stagger to the nearest fainting couch. It absolutely horrifies Everytown and the rest of the civilian disarmament industrial complex that, in addition to home defense, hunting, competition, and just plain fun, one of the reasons Americans buy guns — including those just like the M400 TREAD — is as a bulwark against tyranny.
No, that’s not the primary driver in the firearm market. Most guns sold today — more than a million of them are sold every single month — are purchased for personal defense. A distant number two on the list is hunting and other sport shooting is right behind that.
We’re sure that we’ve read somewhere that foremost on the Founders’ minds when they made the right to keep and bear arms number two on their hit parade, right after free speech, was their opinion that civilian-owned firearms were necessary to the security of a free state.
Any mention of that, howeverm provokes lots of eye-rolling among the gun-grabbing community as they discount — usually a little too loudly — any chance that tyranny could ever raise its ugly head in America again. Let’s hope that’s as true as they want you to believe it is.
In the mean time, though, they’ll just have to learn to live with the fact that Americans have every right to own the kinds of firearms they hate the most. Firearms like the M400 Tread and other scary-looking rifles. They’ll have to deal with the fact that however much they may wish it were otherwise, those rights shall…not…be…infringed.
3 Responses
I hate “Modern Musket”: The Continental Army had plenty of rifles and used them well. They were highly desired arms and behind many of the Continental Army’s critical successes.
“Modern rifle” doesn’t evoke the same imagery and doesn’t recall the past.
If it’s a treading doesn’t that make it the enemy? A rifle for statists perhaps? Sig is in bed with the MIC after all.