I thought they patched civilian
How do you do it now?
go into advanced options and enable remember active weapon between lives. for the sniper, hold your any secondary, die, then change your secondary to anything that can't actually be active. this works for other classes that have passive items, like the gunboats or screen. for spy, hold out your sapper, use an action slot taunt, and type build 3 0 into the console while you're taunting. I forgot how to do it for the engineer, but it's similar to the spy.