Hi, It's West Kosova. Here's an update on this story. The US Commerce Department announced late on Friday that it's halting exports of most US made firearms for ninety days, and it's reviewing its support of the country's biggest gun trade show to ensure it quote does not undermine US policy interests unquote. The Department gave no indication of what long term changes it might make, but the review could alter or even reverse a set of pro industry policies
that have helped domestic manufacturers expand sales abroad. About two million guns are sold in the US each month. Sales have softened a bit post pandemic, but overall, the firearms industry is doing just fine, with more guns in America than people. Though gun makers are increasingly looking to find new buyers overseas, Bloomberg's Michael Smith and Jessica Brice report they're getting a helping hand from a place you might not expect, the US government.
This goes back to an agreement that the Shot Show made with the Commerce Department in twenty thirteen to make a concerted effort to bring more gun buyers up from around the world.
Basically most countries in the world don't have the tolerance for weapons or the demand for weapons that the United States has. You really need that gun culture to rise up in these places, to change the politics, to allow those guns to come in, and to allow that market to bloom.
I'm wes Kysova today on the Big Take Washington plays matchmaker for the gun industry. Jessica, your story starts with a scene of the Shot Show, this big convention in Las Vegas. Can you tell us about the shot Show.
It's the world's biggest firearms industry event. It officially stands for the Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade Show. It happens every January in Las Vegas, and some fifty thousand to sixty thousand gun makers, dealers, enthusiasts fled into this convention center to learn about what's happening in the industry, to make deals, to close deals. The buyers are there to find the weapons that they're then going to bring back to their
stores and sell on. And that includes international buyers who want to meet up with the big gun makers and they want to get access to those products. And really it's a networking event that's inside the industry. It's not open to the public. You have to be involved in the firearms industry in order to get a ticket.
And there's a whole ecosystem sort of events that go along with this. For example, one day where all the sellers take buyers out to the middle of the desert to this giant shooting range where they can just try all the cool guns that they want to see how they fire. And there are also lots of dinners between
clients and their suppliers. And then there's this whole ecosystem of influencing people, networking for social media, trying to promote brands that will hopefully sell more, but the main point is for the gun industry to sell more guns.
And Jessica, you're write about how a little bit out of the way in a less glamorous part of the event is one of the most important groups there, and it's the US government.
Yes, the Department of Commerce works with a number of trade shows. It's not just the shot show that it works. It works with something like thirty trade shows every year, and it brings international buyers to meet up with American companies that want to do business abroad. It does that for electronics, it does that for concrete, it does that for dental equipment. But one of the more controversial products
it does that for is guns. So in that corner of the shot show you have the International Trade Center, you know, it's in one of the ballrooms that has like the partition walls and the burgundy chairs, and there's a lot of bureaucrats basically standing around and what they're doing is they're meeting up with the people that they invited from abroad, whether that's Brazil or Peru, or Mexico or Asia somewhere, or you know, from all over the world.
They bring these buyers into Las Vegas and then they help them set up these meetings with American gun makers, and for a fee, they'll even sit in on these meetings and help close those deals.
Mike, How does the Commerce Department find all of these people to bring to the US to go to the gun show?
So the Commerce Department has what it called specialists. They post in embassies around the world, and their main job is to match buyers of US good with sellers of US goods. Some of these specialists specialize in guns. That's one of the sort of turfs that they have to
drum up business for. They basically talk to entities that are interested in buying guns, and then they just go out and make contacts with these buyers and then they open up a whole world of services that the US government through commerce, provides to essentially get buyers together with sellers in the United States.
These specialists, they're foreign commercial service specialists. Around the world, they typically tend to be like foreign born specialists, so they're foreign born hires. And the reason for that is because the American officers will rotate in and out of embassies and consulates on two or three year stints. But you need the foreign you know, the locals who are there. They're working there, you know, for decades, and they're maintaining
those business relationships. So when the American officers come in, they're ultimately the ones who are always calling the shots. But they're tapping into this network that has been built for twenty thirty years.
So, Mike, the Commerce Department is trying to find buyers. The people they're bringing to Las Vegas, what are some of the countries they're bringing them from.
So these specialists really work in embassies around the world. You have some posts in Asia, in Europe, and some posts in Latin America. In our story, we really focused on Latin America, and we found examples of commerce specialists bringing gun buyers up from Brazil, from Peru, and from different countries in Central America.
So all told, how many different buyers coming to the Shot Show are there as essentially guests of the Commerce Department.
This goes back to an agreement that the Shot Show made with the Commerce Department in twenty thirteen to make a concerted effort to bring more gun buyers up from around the world. Basically, in the first year twenty thirteen, they brought around three hundred and seventy buyers to Shot Show, but by January twenty twenty three this year, that number
had searched to more than thirty two hundred buyers. So that gives you a sense of the scope and the growth we've seen in international buyers being basically brought up by these specialists around the world.
Is it working? Our exports of US guns rising as a result of the Commerce Department's efforts.
One of the frustrating things about how the Department of Commerce operates is that there's no transparency because it involves corporate trade secrets, so there's no real transparency around this program and how it works. We don't know how much in sales the Commerce Department officials are helping to broker.
We don't have a real clear insight into how much exports have climbed because of this program, but we do know that between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two we saw a three hundred percent increase in semi automatic rifles and handguns coming into Brazil.
After President Trump came into office, he basically put the approval process for gun exports into the hands of the Commerce Department, the same department that has the specialists around the world. After that happened, a couple of years ago, gun exports from the United States jumped to sixteen billion dollars and that's almost thirty percent above historical averages. So there you can see sort of how things have changed for the better for gun makers and Jessica.
Does the Commerce Department work with gun advocacy groups or trade associations for the industry.
It's not working directly with the gun advocacy groups, but it works with the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which is the industry group, the trade group that runs shot show, the NSSF, which is how they're known. They're actually more influential in terms of lobbying money being spent in Washington than the NRA is These days, a lot of people know the NRA. The NA has traditionally said that they represent the gun owner. The NSSF represents the gun manufacturer, right,
so who's paying those membership dues. It's the glocks and the Rugers, and the smith and Wessons. All the companies are part of the NSSF, and they're spending almost twice as much money every year to push through laws that are more favorable to gun makers. They advocated for this shift to put Commerce Department more in control and have more oversight over the gun exports.
One of the concerns that the US government has had in the past with gun exports is making sure that they don't go to countries where there are unstable governments, where there are reasons to believe the guns could be used for violence. Is that still something that the US government monitors very closely before they make deals for foreign gun sales.
It's unclear how closely they monitor it. The Commerce Department has taken over processing and essentially approving gun exports licenses. They're called but the state of Hartman. They have the right to look over an export license and stop it if they want. That has happened sporadically from what we can tell, but it's difficult to know how steadfast their policy considerations are and exactly what criteria they use to come up with those decisions.
And what is the Commerce Department said about this when you ask them about the program.
This topic sort of spans the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Commerce, and of all of those departments, and not to mention all the embassies many of which we tried to reach out to. The
Commerce Department is the least transparents. They don't offer any information regarding how many people they send a shot show every year, what sort of resources are dedicated towards the effort, how many folks are out in the world recruiting and building these lists, and these these group trips to Las Vegas every January. Bloomberg entered in with a Freedom of information request so called FOYA, trying to get even the most basic of numbers. We actually have started up a
lawsuit trying to get this information. But they really really are close lift about the entire process.
After the break, exporting US guns also means exporting US gun culture. Jessica, one thing you write is that part of this story isn't just exporting US guns, but also exporting US gun culture to the places where US gun makers are looking to sell their.
Product exporting guns. You know, most countries in the world don't have the tolerance for weapons or the demand for weapons that the United States has, and so it's not as easy as just you know, reaching some deals and shipping these guns abroad. Like you really need that gun culture to run up in these places, to change the politics, to allow those guns to come in and to allow that market to blue. And that's part of this effort.
It's not just about signing contracts. It's also about getting advocates and politicians on board with the Krogen agenda.
And Mike who is pressing in these other countries to change their culture to make them more receptive to US guns.
We looked at a couple of countries that basically have adopted American style gun culture to a certain degree, Brazil and Peru. In Peru, it's very interesting, you have to go back almost fifteen years when a member of the NRA advocacy family, it's they don't have formal ties, but they like each other. It's called Safari Club International. It's
a hunting rights advocacy organization. They found a man named Thomas Saldias, a Peruvian hunter who was getting a graduate degree in Texas, and he really wanted to learn how to lobby for gun rights like they do in the United States, and they basically took him under their wing.
When we spoke to Thomas Seldius, he explained us how Saphari Club International worked very closely with him over years, not only teaching him how to lobby, they took him to Washington and showed him how you go visit your congressman. They also gave him a little bit of money to cover his travel expenses. It was a volunteer job, but he got paid to go back to Peru. First organizing a regional gun rights advocacy organization to try to push
for liberalized gun laws across Latin America. But he also lobbied the Peruvian Congress to stop an attempt to basically ban almost all guns in civilian hands in Peru, and he was quite successful. Congress blocked it. You can basically own as many semi automatic assault rifles as you want if your license gun owner or pistols. It's quite a dramatic change that came about largely because of the influence, financing, and sort of inspiration of the US gun lobby.
It seems hard to believe that one man's lobbying could be so effective. What was the argument that persuaded so many lawmakers in Peru to change their minds?
Well, Saldias was very clever in how he went about this. You have to understand that in Peru, lobbying is not part of the culture, especially not grassroots movements to get stuff changed. People don't have the culture of just going to visit their congressman saying hey, i'm your constituent, you got to do what I want. But that's exactly what he did because he learned in the United States, and he also took advantage of the fact that the president
was under fire. The opposition in Congress wanted to just to get anything they could to take him down, so to speak, and so they really embraced this idea of this president cracking down on the rights of law abiding citizens to own guns. And he really used that quite effectively and convinced Congress almost single handedly to block this effort to restrict gun ownership in Peru.
And what did Safari International have to say about this.
Well, they were very proud of the work he did. They put up press releases about his work. They brought him up to shot Show in twenty fourteen after he organized this regional gun rights organization, and they had a
news conference that they basically sponsored for him. They helped write his remarks that he gave at that news conference, and then they went on to sort of follow his career and publicly call him out in the good way for the work he was doing on behalf of gun rights in a place like Peru.
Jessica, you're in Brazil, and that was another country where the gun culture changed quite a bit.
Brazil has always had pretty restrictive gun laws. Bolsonado came in and that was one of the platforms that he campaigned on, was this idea that law abiding citizens have a right to protect themselves because Brazil is a very violent nation and there are a lot of illegal guns on the streets. It's not like there's no guns here, there's lots of gun violence. He came in on this promise to start allowing like everybody to have guns, so that they can defend themselves, and within two weeks of
taking office, he blew that market open. He just allowed basically anyone who had the will, they were able to get access, they were able to get a license, and they were able to own types of firearms that no one had ever seen before. His son, Eduardo Bolsonado, who's also a lawmaker and also pushing the pro gun agenda.
He'd been to shot shows several times and they had a real tight relationship with the former ambassador in the United States and with the Department of Commerce and the Foreign Commercial Service.
But now Bolsonar's successor is pushing back a bit on this.
Yeah, Bolsonar's successor, Luis Naso Lula da Silvam, he's actually a returning president. He was in office at the start of the century, and he was the one who had pushed through many of the really tight gun laws that Brazil had. When Bolsonato lost the election and Lula took over, on his first day of office, he reversed that he required anyone who had purchased guns to reregister in a
national registry. He blocked all these shipments of guns that had been purchased, and you know, they were stuck at ports and in Georgia and Florida since shut down the market. But what you're seeing is that culture, that gun culture is still very alive and well Lula's bands are based
on decrees, they're not based on laws. That's the real important change that we've had in Brazilian culture recently in that you know, Bolsonado used to be the only pro gun lawmaker and now we have more than one hundred in Congress, and that's rising every year. You're seeing that rise, and it's probably not long before we actually get some laws on the books that open this.
Market up when we come back. Joe Biden has pushed for gun control. What does the administration have to say about its efforts to boost foreign gun sales? Might just to be clear, in places like Peru, in Brazil, where there are these efforts to make the culture more receptive to guns, that's not the US Commerce Department doing that work, is that right.
No, it's more the gun affics groups in the United States.
I think we want to be really clear that it's not the Department of Commerce that's pushing this cultural change. They're pushing business opportunities for American gun makers. The lines are really blurred between the folks who are acting as activists and advocates for the changing culture and the people who are the business representatives for those organizations and sort
of the center of gun culture. It's Shot Show. If you're a gun lover, like, there's no cooler place on earth than to me than Shot Show in Las Vegas every January. That's where a lot of this is happening. And they're all mingling. You know, you have US government officials, you have advocates, you have lobbyists, you have the business folks. They're all mingling in that same universe.
The Biden administration has come out for a greater gun control measures. The presidents signed in an executive order to try to crack down on so called ghost guns that don't have serial numbers. Is there any effort inside the Biden administration about whether they want the Commerce Department doing this kind of work.
There's no indication that's the case. No matter who we reach out to within the government about this program, no one wants to talk about it. Right, it's happening on foreign soil. It's not something that's really really, really front and center to an American audience. It's something that they just declined to comment.
Yeah, it really is a mystery, just because we don't have much insight into what's going on, and the immistration
hasn't really spoken about it. The one thing we have been able to discover is that, you know, there have been instances where the State Department has decided, Okay, we we really shouldn't be exporting guns to this particular country, or they should be restricted, like the example of Peru where there were some really violent protests at the beginning of this year and fifty people were killed by police, mainly in these protests, and so the State Department started
raising concerns about the human rights situation in Peru and putting a freeze on issuing new export licenses. But that's a temporary freeze, and commerce officials have told gun importers in Peru that this will probably be worked out at some point. It's unclear how enduring that will be and whether that will be applied in other places with similar issues.
As you continue to report on this story, what are you following, what are you looking for?
We'd really like to get, you know, additional insight into how the government interacts with the shot show and the NSSF. I think it's really important that there's transparency there because you know, seventy five percent of the nssf's annual budget
comes from shot show. You have government employees around the world driving traffic to that event, and then that money is used to lobby in Washington for more favorable gun laws, and so not having transparency, it just feels like that's something that people should say is unacceptable.
Mike Jessica, thanks so much for sharing your reporting.
Thank you, thank you.
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