FOR ALL THE horrible monotony of another mass shooting in the United States—with the usual cycle of violence, grief, and inaction—last weekend’s massacre in Monterey Park, California, did have one distinctive detail. Instead of yet another “AR-15-style rifle,” the Monterey Park gunman reportedly did his killing with an SWD Cobray M11/9, a weapon from an entirely different era in American gun violence.
Based on the Ingram MAC-10, the SWD M11/9 was one of the guns that led directly to the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Its unexpected reappearance in 2023 is a reminder of just how long we’ve been living with the horror of mass shootings.
The MAC-10 and its descendants were the subject of intense public scrutiny in 1988 after a high school student in Virginia Beach used an SWD Cobray M-11/9 in a pre-Columbine mass shooting. Erik Larson, the author of Devil in the White City, took the weapon from that shooting as an entry point into an exploration of gun culture for a 1993 Atlantic cover story that he later expanded into his 1995 book Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun.
Designed by Thomas Ingram in the 1960s, the MAC-10 was a compact, fully automatic machine gun built for guerrilla warfare in Latin America. One of the desired features was quiet operations, so Ingram partnered with Mitchell Werbell III, who designed a silencer that would fit the new gun.
Ingram seems to have been relatively normal for an arms designer, but Werbell was straight out of central casting. After serving in the OSS during World War II, he was involved in, among many other things: the Dominican Civil War, a failed plot to overthrow the Haitian government, a failed scheme for the Abaco Islands to declare independence from the Bahamas, and several failed plans to overthrow Castro. While brokering arms deals, Werbell represented himself as having active CIA ties, but this doesn’t seem to have been true: he’s all over the JFK Assassination Records, where he is repeatedly described in CIA documents as “unsavory” and a “wheeler-dealer” who was misrepresenting his background. Werbell did look the part: he favored berets and a walrus mustache, and at least one source mentions him occasionally sporting a monocle.