FN MAG

The FN MAG is a Belgian general purpose machine gun designed in the early 1950s by Ernest Vervier and Dieudonne Saive at Fabrique Nationale. It entered production in 1958 and remains in service today across more than eighty countries. The weapon fires the 7.62 by 51 millimeter NATO cartridge from a belt feed and combines a locking mechanism modeled on the Browning M1918 automatic rifle with a feed system derived from the German MG 42. It is gas operated, features a quick change barrel for sustained fire, and has an adjustable cyclic rate between 650 and 1,000 rounds per minute. More than 200,000 units have been produced, including licensed production in Canada, Britain, Argentina and India, and it is used both as an infantry weapon and mounted on armored vehicles.