Finalist: Staff of Bloomberg

Story by Michael Riley, David Kocieniewski and Eric Fan

Graphics by Christopher Cannon

Last October, a recently fired police officer walked into his stepson’s nursery school in the remote northeast of Thailand and, in under 30 minutes, killed 23 children and two teachers. Panya Kamrab hacked some of his victims to death with a sugar-cane machete and shot others point blank with a pistol, including three local government employees eating lunch outside the school. The rampage, which left a total of 36 dead, ranks as the worst in Thai history and one of the worst in the world.

The killer’s gun, a Sig Sauer P365 — touted by the company as small enough to easily conceal yet able to hold 13 rounds — had traveled more than 8,000 miles from a factory on New Hampshire’s rocky seacoast to Thailand’s lush Nong Bua Lamphu province. It was part of a growing number of semiautomatic handguns and rifles exported by American gunmakers and linked to violent crimes. With about 400 million civilian firearms owned in the US, companies like Sig are seeking new buyers abroad, and they’ve found an eager ally: The federal government has helped push international sales of rapid-fire guns to record levels.

The economic and political forces driving those sales were set in motion after the US assault-weapons ban expired in 2004. But they’ve reached new heights since gunmakers in 2020 won a decade-long battle to streamline export approvals. Semiautomatic American-made guns are now pouring into countries ranging from Canada, with its comparatively strict regulations, to Guatemala, where firearms are frequently diverted into the hands of criminals and the government has trampled human rights.

The US Commerce Department has played booster and concierge to the firearm industry, even as America’s mass shootings horrify the world and gun-crime rates rise in many of the importing countries. Commerce employees help recruit foreign buyers, accompany them at the industry’s premier exhibition in Las Vegas each year, and offer an online portal to pair them with US manufacturers.

Since the ban ended, semiautomatic exports have totaled 3.7 million — more than doubling in just the past six years. In absolute numbers, exports are still a fraction of domestic US sales, but their impact on the nations receiving them can be enormous.

“We as a country have been focused on stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” said Tom Malinowski, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor from 2014 to 2017 and a former Democratic congressman. “But if you look at how civilians die in armed conflicts around the world, it’s hard not to conclude that the true weapons of mass destruction are these small arms that are subject to the fewest controls.”

No company worked harder for — or benefited more from — the boost in US gun exports than Sig Sauer Inc., the US-based spinoff of a centuries-old European gunmaker. Over the last two decades, the company has re-tooled itself from a niche maker of hunting rifles and high-end pistols into an American mass producer of inexpensive, rapid-fire weaponry.

Sig’s owner shut down the brand’s main manufacturing site in Germany, while expanding its factories in New Hampshire, where it could take advantage of looser US export laws. “We have clearly defined our path to growth as being in emerging markets and developing countries,” Chief Executive Officer Ron Cohen said in 2010. Today, Sig is the largest US exporter of guns, selling more than 935,000 in the past decade.

It has cultivated close relationships with politicians, including Donald Trump, first as a candidate and then as president. The company used connections to a well-placed Trump administration official to help the industry push a key regulatory change that provided even easier access to overseas buyers: transferring oversight of small-arms exports from the State Department to the business-friendly Commerce Department.

The success that Sig and other US gunmakers have achieved in tapping the power of the federal government spans both Republican and Democratic administrations. The Commerce Department began its VIP treatment of foreign buyers at the Vegas trade show in 2014, during Barack Obama’s second term. And the companies’ export bonanza continues under Joe Biden, even as he decries the wide availability of guns at home.

A spokesperson for Biden’s National Security Council said the US reviews firearm export applications to limit illegal trafficking and diversion of firearms. In February, the administration issued an order to prioritize human rights as a factor in weapons sales. The transfer of responsibility from State to Commerce, the spokesperson said, “has strengthened enforcement and investigative scrutiny over these exports through the addition of specialized enforcement agents at the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, and increased federal authorities and resources available to crack down on the illicit export of firearms.”

Because few crime guns are traced to their origins, it’s unclear exactly how many legally exported US firearms wind up with criminals. A recent federal study found that 11% of guns that had been recovered at crime scenes abroad and traced were legal US exports. Outside North America, the figure was 37%. With the recent surge in export sales, the numbers are likely to rise.

To fuel its overseas push, the US firearm industry, through its political allies, has managed to weaken gun-control laws and seed pro-gun advocacy in other countries, particularly in Latin America. At the same time, the industry-backed oversight changes have reduced Congress’ ability to monitor the gunmakers’ sales abroad.

“There are fewer registration requirements, less oversight, more exemptions and significantly curtailed congressional review,” US Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, told a House Foreign Affairs Committee a year ago in criticizing the Biden administration for not reversing the oversight switch. “It was essentially a giveaway to gun manufacturers a few years ago, and it seems to have worked.”

In the case of Sig Sauer, overseas sales have sparked investigations spanning the US, Europe and Asia. The company’s vice president for international sales surfaced in an investigation that was revealed in federal court documents posted online in December 2022. The status of that inquiry, which involved allegations that hundreds of thousands of dollars were skimmed from gun shipments to the Indonesian military, is unclear. (The court file has been sealed, and federal prosecutors declined to comment.)

In 2018, German officials charged Sig and its CEO, Cohen, with illicitly shipping tens of thousands of pistols to Colombia. Cohen didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment for this article, and the company didn’t reply to a list of questions delivered to its US headquarters. Cohen admitted wrongdoing as part of a settlement that led to Sig paying the largest export fine in German history, €12 million ($14.8 million) — and he received an 18-month suspended prison sentence.

The investigations have done little to slow Sig Sauer’s remarkable growth. Thailand represents one of its biggest international successes. The company overcame the country’s stringent gun ownership rules by fostering ties with the Royal Thai Police and targeting a unique opportunity: The country has a so-called welfare gun program that allows police and local officials to buy weapons for personal use at steep discounts. It’s also a backdoor to a thriving black market for small arms, according to experts who follow the trade.

By pouring hundreds of thousands of guns into Thailand over the last six years, police investigations show, the welfare-gun program contributed to corruption and weapons trafficking, while arming criminal syndicates.

Police files and news accounts are full of crimes committed with the type of Sig pistols imported through the program. There was a drive-by shooting involving drug gangs in Phuket in May 2022 and a police colonel who killed his wife and daughter before shooting himself the following month. This April, a Sig P320 was used in a sensational crime that captured national attention: A military cadet used it to murder his girlfriend, a popular internet influencer, before shooting himself. The pistol had been purchased legally by his father, a retired military general.

The program provided the Sig P365 that Panya Kamrab used in his attack last October.

Two decades ago, Sig Sauer was a bit player in the US market. One of the few guns it actually assembled in the US was a 9mm pistol known as the P226. Of its 43 parts, 42 had to be imported from Germany. When Sig Sauer’s American outpost was acquired in 2000 by a German firm called L & O Holding — part of a package that included Sig’s main European factory on the Baltic Sea — the deal valued the US operation at less than $1.

To help turn the US firm around, the new owners named Cohen the chief operating officer in 2004. An Israeli, Cohen has cited his service as an artillery officer in the IDF during the grinding, guerrilla-style war in Lebanon in the early 1980s as the force that shaped his take-charge management style. He was quickly elevated to CEO in the US, where he has said employees call him “commander.” Cohen charted a strategy of aggressive growth and by 2012 he had opened a new 200,000-square-foot factory in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Cohen focused the American operation on developing so-called black guns, those used by law enforcement and the military. To understand the military’s byzantine acquisition process, the company assembled an informal group of former generals, according to former members of Sig’s executive team who asked not to be identified because they feared legal retaliation. Cohen also hired ex-special forces soldiers and others who understood military culture. He told employees he was giving the company a new mission: Arm the good guys.

Sig’s pistols back then were of high quality but expensive. For his new products, Cohen turned that formula on its head: He outsourced the manufacture of parts to companies in India and elsewhere that use metal injection molding, which is both cheaper and less precise than the hammer forging used in Germany. He leveraged the company’s reputation for Swiss engineering and German craftsmanship, while significantly lowering products’ costs — and quality.

Some new customers soon started to complain, saying that some of Sig’s guns were dangerous. In 2016, the New Jersey State Police returned all 3,000 of its Sig Sauer 9mm pistols because they continually jammed. Product liability lawsuits began to pile up, alleging that police officers had been maimed or killed by malfunctioning pistols. The company hired multiple law firms and powered on.

Sig Sauer’s German owners, Michael Lüke and Thomas Ortmeier — the “L” and “O” of L&O Holding — initially were wary of Americanizing a storied European firm, two former company executives say. They were avid outdoorsmen, and their passion for guns came from an aristocratic love of exotic game hunting. Under Cohen, Sig was increasingly producing firearms designed for killing people. Still, Lüke and Ortmeier approved his plans. They didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The American company landed its first big international deal — a $45 million pistol sale to the Colombian National Police — four years into Cohen’s tenure as CEO. Under the 2009 contract, the company agreed to deliver nearly 56,000 handguns over three years, even though it couldn’t produce anywhere near that number. The Baltic Coast factory, in Eckernförde, could. But German law forbade gun shipments to countries in conflict, including Colombia at the time.

Sig developed a workaround. It shipped German-made SP2022s to New Hampshire and filed export documents that attested the guns would be sold in the US civilian market, according to court records. Once the weapons arrived in the US, however, employees relabeled the shipping boxes and sent them on to Colombia, the records show.

Tens of thousands of pistols made that clandestine journey until 2011, when a Sig employee in New Hampshire sent an email to his German counterparts complaining that substandard packaging had allowed corrosion on some of the German-made pistols headed to Colombia by sea. The Germans, who had no record of the Colombian sales, were surprised and alarmed, according to internal Sig documents filed in court.

Amid fear over potential criminal liability, Cohen flew to Eckernförde, where for two days he and other company executives destroyed documents and deleted emails and other incriminating evidence from computers, according to a former Sig executive who was present and another employee who provided an account in a documentary film that concealed his identity. The event became known among insiders as “the shredding party,” the former executive said.

Months later, Sig hired a new vice president of international sales, Amaro Goncalves. He’d held top international sales jobs at Smith & Wesson and Colt’s Manufacturing Co. He arrived at Sig Sauer with a long list of international contacts, a rainmaker’s reputation and a recent arrest record.

Goncalves had been federally indicted in 2009 and later arrested by FBI agents at the gun industry’s Vegas trade show. The government accused him of attempting to bribe an undercover agent posing as an assistant to Gabon’s defense minister in order to grease a major sale of Smith & Wesson pistols. The case, which included charges against almost two dozen people, fell apart after a judge found that federal agents had deleted text messages that might have proven the defendants’ innocence.

In a series of meetings with Sig’s executive team, the new sales chief laid out ambitious global expansion plans, according to people who attended and asked not to be named out of fear of reprisal. “There was a sense that with Amaro, you were going to be able to sell anything anywhere in the world,” said one former European Sig executive.

On the afternoon of May 22, 2014, the Thai military staged a coup — the 12th time the country’s government had been deposed since the 1930s. The army instituted a nationwide curfew, banned political gatherings and shut down the independent media. Where ordinary Thais saw a body blow to a fragile democracy, Sig found an opportunity.

Thailand has a long history with American guns, dating to its days as an important regional ally in the Vietnam War. Today, children as young as 10 join sport shooting clubs, and Thai boys enroll in government-run gun training modeled on America’s ROTC, one of the few ways to avoid mandatory military conscription.

“We have guns from China, we have guns from Turkey and other countries,” said Boonwara Sumano, senior research fellow at the Thailand Development Research Institute, a public policy group. “But there’s still a feeling in Thailand that US products are superior, more advanced. That includes everything from American-made vaccines to guns.”

In Bangkok, a sprawling capital of 11 million, commercial gun shops are mostly crammed into a two-square-block district called Wang Burapha, where shop owners in flip-flops hover over a flow of ready customers. On paper at least, the supply of retail guns is small. There are 500 gun shops, and each is allowed to import only 30 pistols and 50 rifles a year — what a busy Cabela’s might sell in a week. Gun laws for ordinary Thais are strict; they require one license to buy a gun and another to possess it. The attendant paperwork can take well over a year, and buyers must get their boss or some other authority to certify their fitness to possess a gun.

But there’s a loophole. The country’s welfare-gun program was designed to allow police and government officials to purchase guns much more cheaply than they could in the retail market. The government negotiates price discounts with manufacturers, waiving most of the usual paperwork required for retailers.

Rank-and-file police officers say they need the program because their departments’ guns are dilapidated, even dangerous. Officers are required to check out guns — some of them decades old — from unit armories every morning and check them back in at the shift’s end.

While the welfare-gun program eased such problems, it created another: Buyers were tempted to resell their subsidized guns to friends or on the black market for a handsome profit. For years, the impact of such resales was small because the program typically imported just a few thousand guns annually, according to Thai government data.

The scale of the program surged in 2015. Through a local businessman named Dissatat Dejthamrong, Sig’s Goncalves developed a close working relationship with the then-head of the Royal Thai Police, General Somyot Poompanmoung. Thai political analysts say that after the coup, military budgets increased, and checks on the country’s security forces loosened. Goncalves and Somyot negotiated the largest gun deal in the history of Thailand’s welfare-gun program — worth around $100 million — and the Sig executive flew to Bangkok to announce the deal in April of that year.

The Thai police agreed to import 150,000 Sig Sauer P320 pistols at about $525 each, less than a third of the cost at a Wang Burapha gun shop. It was a landmark deal for Sig as well, starting a run that would propel it far past its rivals.

Before it could move the guns, the company had to overcome one last hurdle. Under US regulations at the time, the State Department led the government’s evaluation of export-license applications. While a department spokesman said he couldn’t discuss specifics related to gun export licenses, three former Obama administration officials familiar with the review said State flagged Sig’s application as problematic, citing the 2014 coup and questions about the transaction’s structure.

The department returned Sig’s application with no approval — and no explanation. The call wasn’t even close, according to one of the former officials. “The country was too unstable,” he said. “With the coup, and its historical problems with corruption and police abuses, it was not the kind of place where we were going to approve a huge sale of guns.”

One of the biggest pistol export deals in the company’s history was blocked. But in June 2015, Donald Trump upended the US presidential race, and Sig had a new ally.

A month before Trump formally declared his candidacy, Sig officials gave him a private tour of their Exeter facilities. When he addressed the gun industry’s premier sales expo in January 2016, his sons Eric and Donald Jr. met with Sig executives at the company’s booth. The following month, Trump’s sons traveled to New Hampshire to visit Sig headquarters in person.

The relationship had benefits for both candidate and gunmaker. Trump got an opportunity to show off his bona fides with sportsmen and gun owners — in a state that hosted the country’s first primary. For Sig, cozying up to Trump completed the company’s transformation, from Old World gunmaker to champion of US gun culture.

Other American arms manufacturers let lobbying groups like the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation represent their interests in the country’s polarizing political fights. Under Cohen, Sig became an aggressive player in its own right.

The company gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the NRA, according to public filings, and sponsored a series of mini-documentaries on the organization’s streaming network. One 2015 episode of “Defending Our America” linked the phenomenon of mass school shootings to the lack of gun-positive education in schools.

In 2016, the company donated $100,000 to #GunVote, a superPAC that heavily supported Trump. In that year’s congressional cycle, Cohen, Goncalves and Sig’s then-chief counsel, Steven Shawver, each donated to a Republican primary candidate for New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District. Richard Ashooh, a former lobbyist for the defense contractor BAE Systems, went on to lose the primary. But when Trump won the presidency, he appointed Ashooh to a position of far more consequence to Sig’s plans. The former House candidate became assistant secretary of commerce for export administration, overseeing the agency’s regulations for firearms exports, among other duties.

Ashooh’s new job dealt with major national security issues like technology exports to China. But the first lobbyist to reach out wasn’t from Microsoft or Micron. It was Larry Keane, senior vice president for government and public affairs for the NSSF. Keane laid out the industry’s rationale for the administrative rule change that would shift oversight of gun exports from the State Department to Commerce.

The idea had been crafted during Obama’s first term to let State focus on heavy military hardware like fighter jets. The administration was set to announce the change in 2012, but then 26 people were fatally shot at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. The plan was shelved. When the administration tried again late in Obama’s tenure, Congress blocked it.

Trump’s administration dusted off the proposal. Ashooh agreed with Keane that the change was a good idea, and over the next three years he guided it to fruition, a person familiar with the events said.

Ashooh also got a call from Shawver, the Sig lawyer who was a fellow BAE alumnus. Shawver asked for help on a more specific problem: He wanted to get some of the company’s big gun contracts unstuck after State had rejected their applications for export licenses. Ashooh and Shawver would not provide comments for this article.

The company now had a friend in the Oval Office and a personal connection with a key Commerce official. It also spent $140,000 to hire Bob Grand, a longtime fundraiser for Vice President Mike Pence, to lobby the State Department directly on international gun sales, according to federal lobbying records.

Sig’s campaign worked. By July 2017, its local Thai partner informed the Thai police that its export license was in the final stages of approval. By December, thousands of P320’s for the welfare-gun program had arrived in Thailand.

As Sig Sauer pistols poured into the country through mid-2018, Thititorn Bupparamanee saw the trouble they caused. The president of the Firearms Traders Association of Thailand, Thititorn isn’t against guns: He makes his living selling high-end pistols and rifles from a shop 8 feet wide on a busy street in the gun sellers’ district. But he believes more gun violence isn’t good for anybody — including the country’s firearm sellers.

People sometimes blame gun shops like his after violent incidents, he says, but all Thai gun shops together are limited to selling 15,000 pistols a year. Sig’s contract cleared the way for 10 times that number through the welfare-gun program, driving an increase in gun violence, he believes. “To acquire the gun is not easy for ordinary people, unlike guns from the program,” Thititorn said.

By negotiating below-market prices, Thai officials and Sig in effect created a new asset class, and people rushed to take advantage. Several police officers told Bloomberg News that they bought their Sig pistols as investments, knowing that they could resell them at a significant markup after a five-year period stipulated in the program.

Those willing to skirt the rules sold them earlier. A police commission created after October’s mass shooting to examine the welfare-gun program found that when cops got into financial trouble, some took their new pistols to pawn shops, where they were resold in hard-to-trace transactions.

Thai investigators have found some of the program’s pistols ended up supplying criminal syndicates and international arms traffickers. One 2022 case led by Thailand’s equivalent of the FBI involved a former assistant village chief whom cops dubbed Danupol “Thousand Guns” Yompong. With the help of high-level officials in two provinces, his gun-trafficking gang allegedly purchased firearms from the welfare program using bought or forged identities, then resold them on the black market for a large profit — or smuggled them into Laos for even more money. Danupol has denied the allegations, according to police.

Authorities say there’s evidence the gang moved more than 2,000 guns that way, and that the final number will likely increase once they complete ongoing investigations in two additional districts.

Exactly what role American guns have played in the country’s gun crime is hard to quantify with available Thai police data. Those involving firearms surged 43% from 34,043 in 2016 to 48,509 in 2021, roughly the period during which imported US pistols poured into the country, according to the data. But those numbers may also include homemade and modified guns, which are popular in the country. And police say they don’t keep statistics on crimes committed with guns imported through the welfare-gun program.

The Thai police official who headed the investigative commission said in an interview that the welfare-gun program is likely to continue, albeit with some changes to eligibility and enforcement. General Torsak Sukvimol, the deputy chief of the Royal Thai Police, conceded that gun crimes generally were going up, but he attributed the rise to larger social forces, including increased drug use.

As Thailand confronted rising gun violence, Sig’s biggest deal there was yet to come.

In March 2020, officials in Thailand announced a contract for about 250,000 new Sig 9mm guns. It was Thailand’s biggest pistol contract and one of the largest ever for a US gunmaker. At the time, the Thai government expanded the welfare-gun program’s eligibility; many more state employees as well as police “volunteers” could buy a new Sig model P365.

The Trump administration approved Sig’s export license with no holdup, and the new guns started shipping to Thailand later that year.

Sometime in 2021, police say, Panya Kamrab got his gun.

In early June, on a major Buddhist holiday in Thailand, the families of the victims of Panya’s October rampage gathered at a local temple and made offerings to the spirits of the dead. They placed small handfuls of rice on plastic plates, and slowly poured water into cups while monks chanted softly under the structure’s steeply pitched roof. In Thailand, human spirits are thought to inhabit places where an unnatural death occurs, especially if that death is violent.

The killer had grown up in this cluster of farming villages but had left for Bangkok to train as a police officer and serve for a couple of years. Almost as soon as he returned home, Panya encountered trouble, according to police and sub-district officials. Amid suspicion that he was abusing yaba pills, a combination of methamphetamine and caffeine used by cane workers in the region, Panya was subjected to several drug tests and then suspended from the police force in January 2022. Six months later, he was fired.

For months, he tried unsuccessfully to enlist the help of village leaders to get his job back, earning money as a day laborer in the cane fields in the meantime. The day of the massacre, he was due in court, where the judge was expected to deliver a verdict on a minor drug charge after police had found yaba at his home.

Before his attack on the school, Panya told drinking buddies that he wanted to kill more people than the 29 who died in a mass shooting at a Thai mall two years earlier, according to two sub-district officials familiar with the police investigation.

Robert Godec, the US ambassador to Thailand, called the killings last October “nightmarish” but said he didn’t know the details of the Sig Sauer welfare-gun contracts. “I don’t think there’s much doubt that more guns available, wherever they are in the world, means more shootings,” he said. “That’s just the reality.”

Panya shot one of the victims, a maintenance worker named Kumthorn Thongpod, as he was eating lunch with colleagues in the shade outside the nursery school. Kumthorn survived, but he still can’t walk, and his labored breathing hisses softly through a tracheal opening in his throat. On the morning of the shooting, Kumthorn had carried his 5-year-old nephew to school, as he usually did. Panya drove up in a white pickup and shot Kumthorn and his colleagues before they even understood he was a threat. His nephew died moments later along with the other children inside.

Panya, 34, made his way through the village, shooting more victims and running others down in his truck before driving home and setting fire to the vehicle, which creditors had threatened to repossess after he was dismissed. Then he fatally shot his wife, his stepson and himself.

Danaichoke Boonsom, chief of the Uthai Sawan sub-district, said it’s impossible to separate the tragedy from the demons that haunted Panya. But there are larger lessons. “Guns are very easy to access, and we see gun violence happening every day,” Danaichoke said. “Something needs to be done.” After the massacre, he brought up troubles with the welfare-gun program during government meetings. “They’ve said they’ll forward my concerns to the central government, but they are the ones who have to make a decision.”

During a recent visit, the now-abandoned nursery school still showed signs of the children who spent their days there. Small cubbies sit outside the front door, and pots with tropical flowering plants are painted in bright colors.

On the perimeter wall sat child-size cartons of milk and a bottle of water with several straws — items left recently to nourish the spirits of the dead children and their teachers, according to a guard hired to watch over the property. He has worked here seven days a week for months, but has never been inside. “It’s just too dark,” he said.

Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates gun-safety measures, is backed by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

With assistance from: Wilawan Watcharasakwej and Anuchit Nguyen

Editors: Flynn McRoberts, Jason Grotto and John Voskuhl

Methodology:

Bloomberg analyzed data from two federal agencies to piece together the volume, value and foreign destinations of US gunmakers’ exports: the US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. We examined data from 2003 through 2022.

Each year, the ATF publishes its Annual Firearms Manufacturing and Export Report, which reveals the number of firearms made and exported by each licensed US manufacturer in the previous year. The reports provide the name and address of each gunmaker as well as the types of firearms they produced, but do not include the trade value or the foreign destinations of the guns.

So, Bloomberg used international trade data maintained by the Census Bureau to track guns exported from each US state to their foreign destinations. To examine the value and volume of centerfire semiautomatic rifles and pistols, reporters relied on the 10-digit Harmonized Tariff Schedule codes. The analysis excluded military rifles, which have different codes.

During its work, Bloomberg identified a discrepancy between US and Canadian trade records that led to a significant US undercounting of its semiautomatic weapons exports to Canada. Specifically, US trade data reflected no semiautomatic firearm exports to Canada prior to 2020, when a regulatory change shifted the oversight of small arms exports from the State Department to the Commerce Department. However, Canadian trade data show that US gunmakers have been exporting semiautomatic pistols and rifles to Canada since at least 2005 — data Bloomberg confirmed by interviewing buyers and retailers in Canada. The US export data to Canada is derived from Canadian import data, due to the US-Canadian Data Exchange program. Consequently, for all statistics concerning semiautomatic exports to Canada, Bloomberg used trade data from Statistics Canada, the Canadian national statistical agency.

Bloomberg analyzed 2016–2022 Thai crime statistics from the Royal Thai Police that break down gun crimes into five categories, including “others.” Gun cases in that category may include homemade guns, modified guns and firearms that the police have not yet classified. In 2022, the “others” category more than tripled to 67,466. The Royal Thai Police did not provide a reason for the abnormal increase. Therefore, Bloomberg used only 2016–2021 figures in this story.

The National Security Council says Guatemala’s lawlessness is fueling waves of desperate migrants. The Commerce Department has said the instability is a ‘unique opportunity’ for gunmakers.

By Monte Reel

Data analysis and graphics by Eric Fan and Christopher Cannon

Photos by James Rodriguez

In courtrooms inside the judiciary tower in Guatemala City, Judge Carlos Ruano constantly confronts stories of criminals and their guns. There was the hit man who had a Glock 9mm tucked under his belt when the police apprehended him. The shooter with the semiautomatic Beretta that sent a bullet through the chest of a man playing basketball in a park. The extortionist whose Smith & Wesson .38 Special was confiscated when he was arrested for shaking down bus drivers. In the evidence packets, snapshots of the guns often appear next to the mug shots of the defendants, as if they’re partners in crime. The backstories of the accused criminals—dates of birth, occupations, addresses, family connections—are dutifully documented. The histories of the guns are not.

Many of the guns in Guatemala, including the three detailed above, were legally imported from the US. American gunmakers have been the leading supplier of firearms to Guatemala for years, but following a regulatory change in 2020, shipments have more than doubled. The vast majority have been semiautomatic pistols, the weapon most commonly used in US gun crimes. The influx has pushed Guatemala ahead of Brazil, a country with 12 times its population, as the top destination for US-made semiautomatics in Latin America. During the same three years, the number of murders in Guatemala has risen annually, after 11 straight years of decline. More than 80% have involved firearms.

What happens to guns after they’re imported and before they end up at crime scenes is often a blank spot in the public record, and the judge suspects these gaps aren’t innocent oversights. He’s noticed a trend in the cases that come into his courtroom: When a gun is confiscated by police and traced back to a national database, the listed owner of the gun—a commercial gun dealer, or a private security company, or even a governmental agency—files a report, after the fact, claiming the firearm in question was stolen or simply lost. That Glock carried by the hit man? It was imported in a shipment destined for the Guatemalan national police, whose administrators reported the pistol stolen from a warehouse after the man’s arrest. The Beretta used on the basketball court was registered to a gun store, which later claimed it was among 106 stolen firearms. The Smith & Wesson had been in a private security company’s warehouse, and after the pistol was found with the extortionist, the company reported that it was one of 236 guns that somehow had vanished from its arsenal.

“A backpack, a sweater, an umbrella—those things can be lost,” says Ruano. He narrows his eyes and lifts his chin. “But that many guns? It just defies logic.” To him, the explanation seems obvious: The guns weren’t lost or stolen; they were sold on the black market. Ruano has asked the national prosecutors in the Public Ministry to scrutinize the specific incidents. The requests have been ignored, he says. “The Public Ministry no longer investigates these cases.”

Guatemala’s unwillingness to crack down on the diversion of firearms has come as the influx of guns has soared. In 2020, regulatory authority for approving firearms exports shifted from the US Department of State to the Department of Commerce, a switch that the gun industry hoped would ease delays and result in more exports. Since then, the rise in sales to Guatemala has been among the steepest of any nation, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of trade data. Imports of US semiautomatic firearms jumped from an average of about 3,600 per year in the 2010s to more than 10,000 in 2021, and nearly 20,000 in 2022. Those figures reflect the broader success of American gunmakers since the US assault-weapons ban ended in 2004. In that time, their semiautomatic exports across the globe have totaled 3.7 million—more than doubling in the past six years alone.

Guatemala vividly, and often tragically, illustrates how the countries on the receiving end of the US export surge are often ill-equipped to handle it. Joe Biden vowed to reverse the regulatory change while campaigning for president, but his administration has kept it in place, and the guns have continued to flow to Guatemala—even as the administration has documented, in multiple State Department reports, the country’s slide into lawlessness. On paper, the foreign policy priority of the US in Guatemala is strengthening the rule of law—in no small part so that its citizens aren’t impelled to migrate away from a dangerous and broken system. In practice, the US government is taking advantage of a business opportunity connected to that same instability: gun sales.

Shipping more guns to a place the US labels corrupt and violent seems a blatant contradiction to Ruano—“especially in a country like Guatemala, with such weak institutions that can’t cope with or control the weapons that do enter,” he adds. But it’s not just the Guatemalan government that’s weak on oversight. The US government’s regulatory safeguards, designed to prevent American weapons from being used to commit human-rights abuses or other crimes abroad, are full of holes, according to recent audits of those programs by internal watchdogs.

Those failures undercut the priorities that the US National Security Council identified for Central America in a recent report: to counteract the “root causes” driving illegal immigration to the southwest border. Those causes include “pervasive violence” and “entrenched networks of corruption.” A State Department assessment of the human-rights situation in Guatemala published this year reads like a checklist for a repressive dystopia: “arbitrary arrest and detention”; “serious problems with the independence of the judiciary”; and “serious government corruption.”

American guns, according to some in Congress, are further corroding a bad situation. “This is one American-made product that should not be pushed upon countries like Guatemala, where we are seeing a mass exodus of primarily women and children because they’re fleeing a government that has failed to answer to their basic needs,” says Representative Norma Torres, a Democrat from California who was born in Guatemala.

From his courtroom bench, Ruano says, he’s seen that guns are often the first link in a chain that drives thousands of Guatemalans to migrate north every year. “Violence increases, and of course people flee because they no longer feel safe in their neighborhoods,” he says. In the past five years, the number of Guatemalans apprehended at the US border has soared, with many of them citing the threat of violence as their reason for migrating.

As Ruano speaks about crime victims who become asylum seekers, two men chat in the hallway just outside the door. They’re slumping in hard plastic chairs, casting obligatory glances at everyone who shuffles past, then resuming their conversation. They’re his bodyguards, assigned by court officials to shadow him because he’s made powerful enemies. From 2007 to 2019, a reformist mindset held sway in Guatemala; thousands of government officials, police and military members were jailed during a comprehensive anticorruption probe run by a United Nations-backed commission. During that era, the judge was approached by a Supreme Court justice, who he says was seeking leniency for her son, a man who’d been charged with fraud and money laundering. Ruano recorded their meeting, and the audio recording cost the justice her job and landed her on the State Department’s list of “corrupt and undemocratic actors.”

But in 2019, then-President Jimmy Morales found out the commission was examining allegations of graft that involved him personally, and he dissolved the panel. Others who’d been under investigation, including a loose confederation of ex-military officers and business elites, joined forces in an aggressive and successful campaign against the reformers. Last year, after the ousted justice’s allies cemented their power over the judiciary, she was reinstated to the Supreme Court. Within weeks of her return, Ruano was charged with a crime: illegally recording the conversation with the justice. Now he’s waiting to see if the Supreme Court strips him of his judicial immunity to allow a trial. If convicted on all five of the counts he’s been charged with, he faces as many as 40 years in prison.

Ruano has been a judge for 14 years, and today his job is one where guns, violence and institutional corruption crash together. He’s weighing a decision as tough as any he’s made in the courtroom: leave his fate up to a judiciary that he believes has been thoroughly corrupted, or join the hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans who, fearing for their safety, have sought asylum abroad.

“It’s a very serious situation,” he says. “But I have to prepare myself. I don’t have much time.”

Oscar Grazioso and his brother, Renzo, run one of the most successful firearms dealerships in Guatemala, specializing in imports from the Italian gunmaker Beretta Holding SA. For years the guns were generally routed from Italy via Spain, which offered direct flights to Guatemala. When Spain banned the transshipment of certain firearms through its borders, Renzo says, the brothers began relying more on the US, where Beretta operates a manufacturing plant in Tennessee. Such shifts have become common as more international manufacturers have moved production to the US to take advantage of its comparatively permissive gun regulations. Today many of the major firearms companies that were founded in Europe—Austria’s Glock, Germany’s Sig Sauer, and Beretta among them—manufacture at least some of their guns in the US and export them from there.

One morning in May, in an office behind the brothers’ showroom, Oscar sifts through the paperwork related to a large shipment of guns that has just arrived in Guatemala on a Delta Air Lines flight. This shipment had been inadvertently split into multiple parcels in the Atlanta airport, which meant the information listed on the importation documents didn’t match the contents of the parcel, and therefore the guns couldn’t be released. While Oscar makes calls to Beretta in the US to straighten out the problem, Renzo explains that untangling bureaucratic knots is a big part of a gun importer’s work. Ordering from American manufacturers, however, usually results in relatively few headaches. “It’s easier because of the transportation, and also because of the permits, now that it’s the Department of Commerce,” he says.

For decades, the State Department oversaw the issuance of export licenses for firearms. Part of the job entailed identifying red flags—human-rights violations, civil disorder, excessive violence and so on—in the countries where the guns were to be sold, and rejecting the license applications if the sale might contradict US interests or foreign policy goals. During the Trump administration, the State Department shed staff. The office of Defense Trade Controls Licensing, which vetted and effectively ruled on the firearms license applications, lost 28% of its staff by 2018 and shuttered its training program for agents, according to a 2019 audit by the Office of the Inspector General. Employees told the auditors they were struggling to keep up with their workload, and one official stated the staffing reductions had “affected both the quantity and quality” of their evaluations of export license applications. Of the approved export applications the auditors reviewed, 95% lacked information required by the government’s guidelines. Unless things changed, the audit stated, there was “limited assurance that licenses issued meet US national security and foreign policy objectives.”

In 2020 the Trump administration shifted the authority to issue export licenses for small arms—a category that includes semiautomatic pistols and rifles—from State to Commerce. As the switch was being debated, some in Congress warned that it might make it easier for US guns to end up in the hands of bad actors abroad. Proponents argued that it would modernize an outdated and inefficient process that always should have been overseen by Commerce, the department specializing in matters of international trade. Government officials backing the move insisted that safeguards would remain in place to block any problematic sales.

The gun industry was all for the shift to the Commerce Department, and it eagerly anticipated more international sales as a result. In a letter urging members of Congress to support the move, the president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation—a trade association for gun manufacturers—predicted the Commerce takeover would be “a significant positive development for the industry … all while not in any way hindering national security.” The National Rifle Association described the change to its members as “among the most important pro-gun initiatives by the Trump administration to date.” In July 2021, Deana McPherson, the chief financial officer of Smith & Wesson Brands Inc., explained to investors on an earnings call that Commerce had opened the flow of guns—particularly handguns—to international markets, eliminating the licensing delays that, along with Covid-19 uncertainty, had reduced exports. Comparing the early months of 2020 with those of 2021, she described the difference as “sort of night and day.”

In the first 16 months after the switch, the Commerce Department approved almost $16 billion in firearms export licenses, which, according to congressional estimates, represented a 30% increase over historical averages. The rate of approvals didn’t change significantly after Biden took office. In a letter to Biden’s commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, last September, a group of Democratic lawmakers said that crime control and the protection of human rights are among the factors her department is required by law to consider when issuing gun-export licenses. They cited licenses for sales in Guatemala, among other countries, as evidence that the department was failing to do so. The letter said Raimondo’s office was effectively “padding the gun industry’s profits while putting deadly weapons in the hands of corrupt actors around the world.”

The representatives and senators posed a list of questions to the department, including requests for more detailed statistics on license denials, examples of any export applications rejected because of human-rights concerns, and a list of the department’s strategies to prevent the diversion of guns to criminals and corrupt actors. Their letter asked for answers no later than Oct. 28, 2022. The Commerce Department still hasn’t responded and has ignored follow-up requests, according to the lawmakers. “Secretary Raimondo’s lack of transparency on gun exports is deeply concerning,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement to Bloomberg Businessweek, “and raises serious questions about whether the Commerce Department’s actions align with President Biden’s gun safety priorities.”

At the time of the rule change in 2020, the value of gun exports to Guatemala had been relatively steady for years. They jumped about 35%, adjusted for inflation, in 2021, and soared again in 2022. Last year the dollar value of guns sent from the US to Guatemala was more than quadruple the annual average of the decade preceding the switch to the Commerce Department.

Commerce says that, unlike State, it employs agents who specialize in export enforcement, and that this has strengthened, not diminished, the government’s ability to ensure that US guns don’t end up in the hands of the criminal or corrupt. However, the US Government Accountability Office last year published an audit finding that these agents are rarely used in the region. Even though Commerce employs hundreds of such agents around the world, none were permanently assigned to Central America. And throughout the four countries the report analyzed (Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras), the department had conducted just two end-use checks on firearms exports in all of 2020 and 2021.

The Commerce Department wouldn’t say whether any additional end-use checks have been conducted in Guatemala since the beginning of 2022 or whether any export enforcement officers have been assigned to Central America at all, even though for years the per capita rate of gun violence has been higher there than anywhere else in the world. In February, the Biden administration issued an order to prioritize human rights as a factor in weapons sales, but the flow of guns to Guatemala has continued uninterrupted. According to the Guatemalan government, gun imports so far this year are on pace to roughly match 2022’s record.

Representative Torres believes Commerce is more eager to fast-track licenses and facilitate deals than State was, and with several other lawmakers she’s drafted legislation to return licensing authority to the State Department. “The Commerce Department, they have a different mission—to sell, sell, sell American-made products,” she says. But Guatemala’s track record, she says, should disqualify the country as a trade partner for firearms. “Guatemala has proven to be a bad actor all around when it comes to weapons—even weapons and equipment provided to them by the US military,” she says.

The Grazioso brothers worry that such concerns could result in a firearms export ban to Guatemala. The guns they import, they say, are rigorously documented and tracked through the point of sale, and gun stores that violate standards end up on government blacklists that prevent them from importing. Such oversight has allowed the gun business to thrive, they said. They also credit the robust trade in part to the Commerce Department’s longstanding promotional efforts. The brothers have worked closely with Commerce officials at the US Embassy in Guatemala. Each year the department hosts delegations of Guatemalan importers attending American gun and security trade shows, and Commerce officials also have organized trade missions to promote sales in Central America. According to a Commerce Department memo from 2020, the stated goal of one such mission was “to leverage the regional political and economic climate” of the region to spur opportunities.

In fact, the safety and security market, the trade category that includes guns, has been identified by the department as a “best prospect industry sector” in the market analysis of Guatemala it provides to potential US exporters. Factors such as gang violence, drug trafficking, an ineffective police force and the proliferation of private security companies have spurred demand, giving American companies “a unique opportunity to showcase their safety and security solutions,” according to one Commerce Department report.

Earlier this year Oscar Grazioso was part of a delegation of local gun importers who, with assistance from the Commerce Department, attended the SHOT Show in Las Vegas—America’s largest annual trade show for gunmakers. “In fact, the delegation from Guatemala is one of the biggest in Vegas,” he says. The Commerce Department helps importers like him connect with manufacturers in the US. “They’re always trying to make it easier for us,” Renzo says.

Judge Ruano and his colleagues sentenced the extortionist arrested with the Smith & Wesson .38—the gun that was among the 236 the private security company said it had lost—to prison for illegal possession of a firearm, among other crimes. Three years later, in 2019, police charged the man with several more counts of attempted murder. From behind bars, he was using a smuggled cellphone to make as many as 60 calls a day to private bus operators, police said, telling them his hit men would kill them or their drivers if they didn’t pay their weekly “quotas.” He was part of a network of extortionists that for years has sent ripples of terror through Guatemala City and its outskirts. One of the households it ultimately reached was that of the Muñoz family, whose lives continue to be radically altered by the guns coming into the country.

You’d never know by looking at Gaby Muñoz’s lineless, 20-year-old face, but she carries the weight of that violence everywhere she goes. She grew up in Villa Nueva, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the capital’s metro area, with four siblings and four half-siblings. On Villa Nueva’s street corners, young men linger, working as lookouts for gangs, keeping track of everyone who comes and goes. Auto shops sell tires and hubcaps, and street vendors hawk everything from basketball shoes to underwear, but many of the shops that line the streets sit empty, abandoned. In May, a banner hung outside one of those businesses—a shuttered Domino’s Pizza franchise—with an explanation: “Unfortunately, and as a consequence of criminal acts that put our staff at risk, we have seen the need to temporarily suspend operations.”

Violent crime has strangled economic opportunity in the neighborhood, and Muñoz says it forces residents to risk their lives to earn a living. Her oldest brother, Héctor, got a job with one of the local bus lines when he was 14, starting as a ticket taker and graduating to driver a few years later. At the time, in the mid-2010s, criminal gangs were making millions of dollars a year by extorting bus companies, threatening drivers if their bosses didn’t make weekly payments. Around the same time, the Guatemalan government began funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies into the transportation sector, much of it flowing with a complete lack of transparency. This, according to investigations launched by the anticorruption commission, created shadowy alliances among the extortionists, business elites and government officials.

The owner of Héctor’s bus line always handed over his payments, until one week he didn’t. At the time, Héctor was three days into healing from an appendicitis surgery, but the owner asked him to cut his recovery short to fill in on a shift. Héctor needed the money, Muñoz says. He had a wife and five young children to support. At about 5 p.m., a hit man employed by the extortion ring boarded the bus and shot Héctor through the skull. He survived for almost a year but never left the hospital and was never able to utter a word before dying from severe brain injuries.

Gaby’s second-oldest brother, Byron, had by that time also found work as a bus driver, for a different line. Like the others in the family, she says, he was uneducated, with few prospects. History repeated itself a few years later: A gunman for the bus extortionists shot him. They didn’t intend to kill him, Muñoz says, but instead wanted to send a message to the bus line’s owner. The bullet went through Byron’s left forearm. The gunman fled on a motorcycle but crashed into a car during the getaway, and police arrested him. Byron, meanwhile, permanently lost the use of his left arm below the elbow. Today he still drives a bus, steering through the streets with the full use of just one arm.

Naturally, some of the other siblings began to question whether they should look elsewhere for opportunity. Gaby’s youngest brother, Emerson, is two years older than her, and her relationship with him is especially close. Both had friends who’d recently crossed the southwest border into the US, and the possibility intrigued Emerson. Many of the migrants who made it across cited violence as their reason for coming and for seeking asylum. From 2012 through 2018, what the US government calls migrant “encounters” at the southwest border generally fluctuated between 250,000 and 500,000 per fiscal year. In 2017, for example, the total number of migrant apprehensions numbered 303,916, with more than 38,000 of them citing “claims of credible fear” as their motive for crossing, according to the US Border Patrol. By 2019 the total number of apprehensions jumped to 851,508, with more than 66,000 claiming fear.

During the pandemic, the US government declared a public-health emergency and implemented Title 42, which removed the opportunity for migrants to apply for asylum and other humanitarian protections. Despite those restrictions, the number of encounters at the southwest border has soared under Biden—to 1.7 million in 2021 and 2.2 million in 2022. Guatemalans accounted for 228,220 of the 2022 encounters, more than any country other than Mexico.

Emerson looked into joining that northward tide. But he’d need to hire a “coyote” to arrange his transportation and passage. The price tag—anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000—was more than he could afford. So he decided to stay. He spent the little money he had on a Bajaj Pulsar motorbike.

This spring, Emerson was riding early in the morning when two bullets hit him in the lower back, narrowly missing the base of his spine. As he bled on the street, he managed to call his sister’s cellphone. The shooter, or shooters, had stolen his motorcycle and fled. When Gaby arrived, Emerson was lying unconscious in the street. Gaby rode in the ambulance with him to the hospital, where he remained in critical condition for several days. Today he’s still mostly bedridden and must use a colostomy bag, but he’ll survive.

On June 1, Judge Ruano slipped his black robe over his shirt and tie, opened his laptop and logged in to a court hearing that was to be conducted via videoconference. His lawyer sat to his left, because at this hearing Ruano wasn’t the judge but the defendant.

On his screen, Ruano saw a gallery of the forces that have aligned against him. The plaintiffs acting as prosecutors in his case are members of the Foundation Against Terrorism, known by its Spanish initials, FCT. It was founded primarily by ex-military members and their families, particularly those who were charged with human-rights abuses and other crimes after Guatemala’s brutal civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. The leaders of the group have been denounced by the US State Department as corrupt and antidemocratic, but in the past three years they’ve effectively seized control of much of the Guatemalan judiciary.

It’s the FCT, not Public Ministry prosecutors, that has brought the case against Ruano. The group has taken credit for forcing more than 20 judges to flee the country since the 2019 disbanding of the anticorruption commission, an institution the US government spent tens of millions of dollars to support. The FCT also has led the campaigns that have imprisoned journalists, prosecutors and politicians who spoke out against the sorts of human-rights abuses the group’s members and its allies have been accused of. The allegations have ranged from mass killings to rape to the persecution of political enemies.

Ricardo Méndez Ruiz, founder of the FCT, likes to compare it to a band of sharpshooters, and he’s posted photos online of the officials he’s pursued in court. The images feature large red X’s over their faces, representing a sniper’s target. “A legal shot,” Méndez Ruiz wrote under the pictures. “A civil death.” The group’s connection to guns isn’t solely metaphorical. Members are outspoken in their support of the firearms trade, and they believe more guns in Guatemala will help maintain civil order against the country’s enemies within. “The people must be armed and defend life, liberty and property,” the FCT’s attorney, Raúl Falla, has written. “Fire is fought with fire, but in greater proportion. An armed populace is a populace at peace.”

The idea that the trade of guns and other weapons can be stopped to promote foreign policy objectives is written into the US Federal Code. “The judicious use of export controls is intended to deter human rights violations and abuses, distance the United States from such violations and abuses, and avoid contributing to civil disorder in a country or region,” the code states. When lawmakers in the US argue that the gun trade is causing harm in Guatemala, they don’t simply mean that it feeds street crime and violence, which in turn fuels migration; they also mean that it legitimizes and enables the actions of those wielding power, which in today’s Guatemala means groups such as the FCT.

During the court hearing, Falla and Méndez Ruiz argued that Ruano—who in 2021 was honored in a ceremony by the State Department as an “anticorruption champion”—was a threat to Guatemala’s security. As he listened, Ruano didn’t hide his exasperation. His head shook slowly from side to side, his eyebrows climbed his forehead, his mouth repeatedly bent into an astonished smile. In a tone of disbelief, he asked the court: “What message does this send to the public? What message does it send to judges? That we have to give in to pressure? That we have to do favors, and that we have to take bribes, wherever they come from?”

As Ruano spoke, Falla raised his cellphone to his screen to take a photo of the judge. When the hearing was over, Falla posted the picture of Ruano on Twitter, captioning it with the same words he had used earlier that day to conclude his statement to the court: “Prisoner or Fugitive?” It was a challenge to Ruano to accept one of the two outcomes of the case that the FCT considers acceptable.

After that, Falla retweeted, without comment, several pictures of pistols and automatic rifles that originally had been posted as promotional advertisements by American gun dealers and manufacturers.

In the two months before Guatemala’s Aug. 20 presidential election, the crisis inside Guatemala’s justice system deepened, throwing the country into turmoil and jeopardizing the election itself.

In June one of the country’s most vocal critics of government corruption, a newspaper publisher named José Rubén Zamora, was put on trial. Prosecutors from the Public Ministry, with courtroom assistance from the FCT, accused him of money laundering—a charge that numerous human-rights organizations and press freedom advocates cast as a manufactured attempt to criminalize independent journalism. As Zamora attempted to defend himself against the charges, the ministry and the FCT targeted the attorneys who tried to help him. Ultimately, four of Zamora’s lawyers were prosecuted and detained, and two others were forced to flee the country. When Zamora’s newspaper, El Periódico, highlighted irregularities in the case, the government accused nine of its journalists of obstructing justice. The State Department issued a series of statements condemning the Guatemalan government prosecutors.

One afternoon after another day in court, Zamora stood in a parking lot behind the court tower, waiting for his ride. Thin and angular, with bright silver hair, he held a manila folder in both hands, which obscured the handcuffs locked around his wrists. He said he appreciated the US government’s words of encouragement, but he also dismissed them as toothless. Real change in Guatemala, he said, would come only when the private sector and big business demanded it. That’s where the US could step in. “The US should paralyze trade—guns and everything else,” Zamora said. “The only way the forces will shift here is if they feel it in their wallets.” Weeks later, Zamora was convicted, and he’s serving a six-year prison sentence.

Upstairs in the same building where Zamora was tried, Ruano was attempting to go about business as usual, but little in Guatemala felt normal this summer. On June 25, more than 20 candidates for president competed in a first round of voting to determine which two of them would earn a spot on the August ballot. Bernardo Arévalo of the Semilla party took a public stand supporting all the judges, prosecutors and journalists who’d been imprisoned or forced into exile. During that first-round vote, Arévalo captured about 12%, enough to finish second and secure his place in the runoff.

Ruano was elated. “The sun’s rays are about to shine,” he posted on Twitter. “In Guatemala, a dawn is here …”

The optimism was premature. The Semilla party, which before the voting hadn’t seemed a threat to the status quo, was now in the Public Ministry’s crosshairs. The ministry announced that Semilla had collected invalid signatures when it registered as a party in 2018, and therefore Arévalo’s candidacy was fraudulent. Once again, the US government decried Guatemala’s flouting of democratic norms.

July was marked by days of confusion and judicial chaos. A Guatemalan high court ruled that the government couldn’t retroactively reverse the outcome of an election, effectively restoring Arévalo’s candidacy. But the very next day, the Public Ministry said it would continue to investigate Semilla, and its agents raided the party’s headquarters, seizing files and documents.

By the beginning of August, the FCT was leading the charge against Arévalo’s campaign. But with each passing week, he was rising in the polls. It seemed for a moment that Ruano’s case might get lost in the tumult. But he wasn’t safe. In media interviews, Arévalo admitted that even if he won, his hands would be tied when it came to helping those who’d already been targeted by the FCT and the Public Ministry, and those who’d gone into exile might not easily return.

Ruano was ordered to report to court on Aug. 4 to present any evidence to support his claim that his judicial immunity shouldn’t be stripped. Normally, he says, such court proceedings are scheduled up to two months in advance; he’d been given days. “It seems they’re speeding things up, trying to rush it,” he says.

If the court strips him of immunity, as it has in similar cases involving other judges, Ruano fears he’d have no choice but to go into exile. “It puts me at heightened risk of suffering attacks on my security, on my liberty and even on my life.” He believes the FCT will push for him to be detained in prison, alongside many of the violent criminals he’s sentenced over the years.

The prisons in Guatemala are notoriously violent. Every year, Guatemalan prison officials confiscate dozens of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition during surprise inspections of the inmates’ cells. The week Ruano was summoned to court, inside Guatemala City’s largest prison an inmate shot two guards and another prisoner.

The gun used by the inmate will likely end up in the government’s warehouse of confiscated firearms—a stash that this year totaled 68,980—the majority of which had at one time been legally registered.

While Ruano’s case progressed, a couple of events that by now felt familiar punctuated Guatemala’s strange days of summer. The US government in late July sanctioned 10 more officials for corruption and for undermining democracy. And the first case the judge reviewed as the Supreme Court deliberated his fate was the sentencing of a criminal for illegal possession of a firearm.

Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates gun-safety measures, is backed by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

With assistance from: Natalie Obiko Pearson and Michael Riley

Editors: Flynn McRoberts, Daniel Ferrara and Jason Grotto

Methodology:

Bloomberg analyzed data from two federal agencies to piece together the volume, value and foreign destinations of US gunmakers’ exports: the US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. We examined data from 2003 through 2022.

Each year, the ATF publishes its Annual Firearms Manufacturing and Export Report, which reveals the number of firearms made and exported by each licensed US manufacturer in the previous year. The reports provide the name and address of each gunmaker as well as the types of firearms it produced, but do not include the trade value or the foreign destinations of the guns.

So Bloomberg used international trade data maintained by the Census Bureau to track guns exported from each US state to their foreign destinations. To examine the value and volume of centerfire semiautomatic rifles and pistols, reporters relied on the 10-digit Harmonized Tariff Schedule codes. The analysis excluded military rifles, which have different codes.

During its work, Bloomberg identified a discrepancy between US and Canadian trade records that led to a significant US undercounting of its semiautomatic weapons exports to Canada. Specifically, US trade data reflected no semiautomatic firearm exports to Canada prior to 2020, when a regulatory change shifted the oversight of small arms exports from the State Department to the Commerce Department. However, Canadian trade data show that US gunmakers have been exporting semiautomatic pistols and rifles to Canada since at least 2005 — data Bloomberg confirmed by interviewing buyers and retailers in Canada. The US export data to Canada is derived from Canadian import data, due to the US-Canadian Data Exchange program. Consequently, for all statistics concerning semiautomatic exports to Canada, Bloomberg used trade data from Statistics Canada, the Canadian national statistical agency.

By Natalie Obiko Pearson, David Kocieniewski and Eric Fan

Graphics by Christopher Cannon

Some 300 miles north of Canada’s border with Montana, the prairies end, the roads narrow and the rural towns give way to the vast, unbroken forests of northern Saskatchewan, where on clear nights the aurora borealis dance above pristine lakes.

This is the home of Canada’s highest rate of gun crimes.

Drive-by shootings, the latest just a few months ago, have erupted in the quiet lanes of La Ronge, which serves as an entry point to the northern expanse. In May 2022, a 32-year-old man was shot dead at a cottage. A month later, on a sunny Sunday morning, La Ronge went into lockdown as an emergency alert warned of two suspects, armed with handguns, on the loose. In a community of some 7,000 people, police in recent months have seized more than 50 rifles and handguns. The firearms now line one wall of a storage room. A dozen more are stashed, barrels down, in a blue bucket.

“There are a lot of people with firearms that shouldn’t have one,” said Tom Roberts, an Indigenous elder in La Ronge. “In small northern communities, it’s scary for a lot of people. A lot of the elders don’t go for walks in the morning or the evening like we used to.”

La Ronge’s crime wave has come amid a historic increase of US semiautomatic firearm shipments to Canada, part of a push by American manufacturers over the last 20 years to export guns into private hands around the world. Weapons flowed to Canada, Guatemala, Thailand and elsewhere as the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation primed markets by stoking opposition to gun control. Gun companies had help from the US government, which has used the Commerce Department and embassies to recruit buyers.

The impact on Canada has been profound as new types of weapons began coming north. With a centuries-old gun culture but little firearm manufacturing of its own, Canada has long been the largest importer of US hunting rifles and has been ranked second only to the US among developed countries in guns per capita. In recent years, though, the number of semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles coming from the US each year has skyrocketed — from just 6,205 in 2003 to more than 66,000 in 2022. While those numbers are a small fraction of US domestic sales, in per capita terms Canada is now the biggest foreign buyer of American rapid-fire weapons.

Over the same two decades, the country’s annual rate of shootings per capita — incidents referred to as “discharge firearm with intent” — surged almost sevenfold. In Saskatchewan, which saw the highest increase, that rate exploded 35-fold since 2003 and is now nearly five times the national average, according to a Bloomberg analysis of national crime data. These concurrent trends — more guns, more shootings — have alarmed Canadian authorities.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won election in 2015 after promising to keep guns out of criminals’ hands. Since 2019, he has passed legislation tightening background checks and requiring retailers to record gun sales. He used a decree to ban 1,500 models, most of them semiautomatic rifles, in 2020 and another last year to freeze handgun imports, sales and transfers. Through June, semiautomatic firearm imports were down 35% compared with the same period last year.

Those measures have galvanized a growing pro-gun movement that has adopted political tactics pioneered in the US. Its proponents argue that the crime surge stems from weapons smuggled from the US and that legal guns play little role.

“By definition, criminals break the law — a new law won’t change that,” Pierre Poilievre, leader of the pro-firearm Conservative Party, told a gun group at a dinner called “Stick to Your Guns” last year. “Border-based gun smuggling” is the real problem, he said.

More Guns, More Shootings

Until recently, data didn’t exist to fact-check that argument because Canada traced few crime guns to their origins. Then in January, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives disclosed for the first time that of the almost 25,000 Canadian crime guns it traced from 2017 to 2021, one of every three had been legally imported from the US. That figure was three times the global average.

Tracing in Canada is still largely in its infancy, but as more data is gathered it’s becoming clear that legal imports are a larger problem than has been recognized. Toronto, close to the US border, is known to have a higher percentage of smuggled guns than the rest of Canada. Still, national figures obtained by Bloomberg News — through confidential documents, public information requests and parliamentary disclosures — indicate that Canadian law enforcement officials and policymakers have often understated the role that legally imported weapons play in crimes.

Data from the Canadian National Firearms Tracing Centre, for instance, indicate that half the crime guns it traced in 2022 were what authorities call “domestically sourced” weapons. That term actually means most of them were legally imported because Canada manufactures few firearms.

The US isn’t the nation’s only gun supplier. Canadians also buy from Turkey, Italy, China and other countries. But American gunmakers account for fully half of all imports and two out of every three semiautomatic handguns and rifles, according to Canadian trade data.

Despite Trudeau’s gun-control measures, Canada may not have felt the full impact of that surge yet. Imports of US-made semiautomatic firearms peaked last year, and the average interval between a gun’s purchase and its use in a crime was four years in Canada, according to the ATF.

This fall, Trudeau is expected to make the handgun decree a law as part of one of the nation’s most ambitious firearm bills in three decades. That has invigorated the Conservative Party, which boasts a record of rolling back gun control and has begun polling ahead of Trudeau’s Liberals in recent months. Canada’s increasingly aggressive gun rights groups, which are aligned with the Conservatives, say they won’t stop until they’ve ousted Trudeau.

Even if the controls survive, advocates worry that so many weapons have already seeped into the country that Canada has passed a turning point.

“Twenty-five years ago, we’d see all the violence guns were causing in the US, shake our heads, and think ‘Maybe they’ll look at how much safer things are up here and become more like us,’” said Wendy Cukier, co-founder of Canada’s Coalition for Gun Control and a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. “But, unfortunately, we’ve become more like them.”

Guns have been part of Canadian life since the nation’s birth. When the Dominion of Canada formed in 1867, the government encouraged civilian gun ownership to defend the new country against the US. Hunting remains a way of life for many in a country whose land area is 92% rural. Canadian gun owners, who span the political spectrum, believe in their right to firearms even if it’s not one recognized by Canada’s constitution and courts.

Attempts to regulate firearms stretch back almost as far, including a requirement to register the ownership of all handguns that dates to 1934. But it was a mass shooting in 1989 at École Polytechnique de Montréal — where a gunman used a Ruger semiautomatic rifle bought at a local sporting goods store to kill 14 women and wound more than a dozen other people — that ushered in Canada’s modern era of gun control.

Outrage over the killings led to a national debate that culminated in expanding the registration requirement to long guns in 1995 — alarming firearms advocates south of the border. The NRA helped the homegrown Canadian Shooting Sports Association set up a political arm to battle the expanded rule. The American organization also coached the Canadian group’s members in grassroots advocacy to promote pro-gun candidates in the 2006 election that made Conservative leader Stephen Harper prime minister.

In 2012, Harper repealed the long-gun registry and, over the protests of police organizations, ordered the ownership records of 5.6 million rifles and shotguns destroyed — a decision that still stymies police agencies’ ability to trace crime guns.

Today, Canadians are increasingly interested in rapid-fire weapons. The country’s most popular gun show — focused on so-called tactical firearms inspired by military models — drew nearly 20,000 people in 2019, only its second year. According to one blog, it was the largest gathering of gun users in three decades. There are nearly as many ranges as McDonald’s outlets; licensed gun owners outnumber ice hockey players four to one.

At the same time, pro-gun doctrines ripple across the border in a steady feed of podcasts, YouTube channels and online websites. Gun manufacturers tweak designs just enough to get them past Canada’s more stringent laws — like the Canadian version of the Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol, whose barrel was lengthened ever so slightly to make it legal for sale.

Assessing the continuing influence of the NRA abroad isn’t a simple task. One of the group’s officials has said its “quiet diplomacy” makes it the world’s most influential firearm advocate. James Baranowski, the organization’s director of international affairs, cited the Canadian debate over Trudeau’s policies while addressing the group’s January 2021 board meeting. He said the NRA’s efforts are “often in the shadows,” but the results “can be seen and heard around the world.”

An NRA spokesman, Billy McLaughlin, didn’t respond to questions about the group’s interactions with Canadian gun advocates. Instead, he pointed to crime increases in Canada and the US, criticizing Trudeau and President Joe Biden. “Both leaders champion stricter gun controls,” McLaughlin said, “and often target responsible gun owners, even as crime rates escalate in both countries.”

For their part, Canada’s gun groups have grown more sophisticated. In the past year, they’ve filed legal challenges seeking to overturn Trudeau’s 2020 rifle ban and last year’s handgun freeze. Both are pending; a ruling in the rifle case is expected any day.

Groups like the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association steer potential customers to the US Commerce Department, which matches Canadian law enforcement agencies, gun retailers and “influencers” with American firearm companies. The US-based National Shooting Sports Foundation reaches north of the border by including hundreds of Canada’s gun clubs on its “Where to Shoot” App and website, which feature an interactive map of firing ranges.

“In the 1970s, there weren’t a lot of Canadian gun groups,” says R. Blake Brown, Canada’s foremost historian on gun control. They were mostly hunting groups that adamantly rejected being labeled as lobbies. But times have changed. “Canadians — who once rejected the idea that they were somehow affiliated or influenced by the NRA in the 1970s — are now more willing to adopt some of those ideas and play around with them.”

Of the gun-rights groups inspired by the NRA, the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights is one of the most successful. Espousing policy positions once unthinkable in Canada — like lifting prohibitions on fully automatic machine guns — the group has shown a remarkable capacity to mobilize people to its cause. Mid-pandemic, it rallied 5,000 Canadians in a march on Ottawa to oppose Trudeau’s 2020 ban of rifle models.

The CCFR was founded in 2015 by breakaway members from the country’s oldest gun advocacy group, the National Firearms Association, in a move reminiscent of the NRA’s splintering in the 1970s when Second Amendment advocates ousted more moderate leaders. Among those leading the Canadian break was Shawn Bevins, a former NFA executive who once touted a Christmas ad featuring Santa Claus gifting an AR-15 to a child with the tagline “No Ho Ho Compromise.”

CCFR’s first directors included Tracey Wilson, a registered lobbyist dubbed the “Gun Goddess” by Canadian newspapers, and Rod Giltaca, who’d worked as an HVAC engineer. In just a few short years, they orchestrated a remarkable rise to influence.

Today, the coalition — with a staff of only six and no office — has 45,000 members and 90,000 individual donors, and it draws annual revenue of more than C$2 million ($1.5 million), Giltaca told the organization’s annual general meeting in June. It boasts the highest-rated show on a Canadian outdoor-lifestyle TV channel and takes credit for helping to force Trudeau’s government to revise a bungled attempt to ban assault weapons last year.

Giltaca brushes aside concerns that looser, American-style firearm regulations could take Canadian gun violence to US levels. Canada has far more vigilant oversight of gun ownership than the US, he said, including a screening process that alerts law enforcement officials when a registered gun owner commits a crime or has a mental health issue flagged. And Giltaca said the social ills that drive violent crime in the US are far less severe in Canada.

“What are the root causes of crime?” he asked in an interview with Bloomberg. “Poverty. Lack of economic opportunity. Racial divisions. And way down the list is the availability of guns. We have those problems in Canada, but not to the same extent that you have in the US. So in Canada, people shooting and killing you doesn’t happen as much.”

Giltaca said his group has never received funding or strategic help from the NRA or any other US gun-rights group. He declined to release the CCFR’s list of donors, saying confidentiality helps prevent adversaries from undermining the group’s plans and that most contributors hadn’t given him permission to reveal their identities. In June, Giltaca told members that its donors on average give C$65.40 each and don’t include “some kind of shadowy cabal of gun manufacturers.”

In the group’s early days, Wilson, a competitive shooter and lawyer, promised a more media-savvy approach that would win over the hearts and minds of Canada’s non-gun owners. Then came the Danforth shooting.

On a July evening in 2018 in Toronto’s Danforth neighborhood, families strolled for ice cream and diners spilled onto restaurant patios. When sharp, staccato-like shots rang out, many assumed they were fireworks. The gunman sauntered along the strip, randomly firing into restaurants and cafes, in a 10-minute rampage that claimed two young lives, wounded 13, and altered the perception of gun crime in Toronto, long considered one of the world’s safest major cities.

The incident set off cries for tougher gun control. Wilson responded by calling the families affected by the shooting “ghouls” and “buffoons” for advocating for a handgun ban. Giltaca, speaking on behalf of Wilson for this article, defended the CCFR’s clashes with Canadian gun-control groups: “Understand that our conduct towards them is a response to their behavior, after I made numerous attempts to work with them.”

Wilson, CCFR’s vice president of public relations, has at times urged her tens of thousands of social media followers to troll her ideological opponents. Months after the massacre, Wilson touted a storybook for children called Why Everyone Needs An AR-15. She deleted the tweet hours later because, she said, she’d received “vile, vulgar responses” to it.

CCFR’s adversaries include a Toronto trauma surgeon, Najma Ahmed, who treated victims of the Danforth shooting and built a coalition after the tragedy. The group Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns quickly found traction, winning endorsements from nearly a dozen major medical associations and grabbing the attention of Trudeau’s office by talking about gun violence in public health terms.

Ahmed says about five years prior to the Danforth shooting, people in the medical community — trauma surgeons, pediatricians, psychiatrists, social workers — had begun to notice an uptick in the rate of gun violence.

“We were talking about it amongst ourselves,” she said. The shooting “crystallized for all of us and many Canadians that this is not a US phenomenon only — that we need to pay attention.”

In February 2019, Wilson posted the address of the investigations department of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario on Twitter, with a link on how to file a complaint against Ahmed. In the post, she wrote, “Stay in your lane, Doctor” — a nod to what the NRA had told the American College of Physicians to do a few months earlier after ACP issued a position paper framing gun violence as a public health issue. Her post has since been taken down.

Some 70 complaints soon flooded into the college — none of them from anyone who’d been treated by Ahmed. The regulatory body summarily dismissed them, saying, “The complaints process should not be used as a tool to silence or intimidate physicians.”

The effort failed, but it made an impression on Ahmed. “How worried am I?” she asked. “Worried. Very worried about the Americanization of our gun culture.”

The Danforth killer’s weapon was made in America: a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol that arrived at a Saskatchewan retailer, was reported stolen in 2016, and made its way 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles) across the country into the shooter’s hands. Legally imported, it was part of a push by the storied American gunmaker to get more handguns into the hands of overseas buyers.

In the early 2000s, US firearm production had been flatlining for years, and manufacturers needed new growth. Smith & Wesson launched a series of products in 2005 that it named M&P for “Military & Police” — weapons designed for war and law enforcement — and marketed internationally. Within two years, 5,000 officers in 13 countries outside the US were carrying M&P guns, a company executive said on an investor call.

Other gunmakers followed similar strategies. Austria-based Glock, which makes pistols in the US, says it now sells to more than 80% of Canada’s law enforcement agencies. It also makes the third-most popular brand among civilians, and its Canadian sales broke new records in 2020, the company spokesman told TheGunBlog.ca. Colt’s Manufacturing LLC, the iconic Connecticut-based company that supplies machine guns to Canada’s armed forces, in 2014 released a Canadian-made AR-style assault rifle for the commercial market. Colt, which Czech gunmaker CZ bought in 2021, is now one of the top 10 brands of handguns owned in Canada.

Smith & Wesson found that marketing guns for military and police use made civilians want them more, in what executives called the halo effect. “Our sales in the professional user channel, mainly law enforcement and government, are intended to ultimately drive consumer sales,” James Debney, then-president of the firearms division, explained to analysts in 2011, shortly before rising to CEO.

At the time, the company estimated that the broader annual market for military and police sales would top out at 200,000 guns a year. By contrast, civilian markets might reach 4.5 million, if people could be persuaded that they needed guns for protection.

“For want of a better word, it was fearmongering among consumers,” says Harry Falber, a long-time associate of Debney who first began consulting for Smith & Wesson in 2009, then ran its licensing business before leaving in 2012 over what he described as ethical concerns about the company’s marketing practices. “You recognize that there’s only so much growth that can happen in the existing marketplace. You have your machines turning out guns and you say, where are the guns going to go?”

Smith & Wesson, Colt’s Manufacturing and Glock didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A Toronto-area police department became the first international buyer of Smith & Wesson’s semiautomatic M&P 40 in early 2006. The model became a commercial hit, part of a two-decade trend in which the number of semiautomatic handguns in Canada more than tripled to 866,806 as of June, according to data obtained from the Canadian National Firearms Tracing Centre.

Today, the top 10 crime guns in Ontario are all semiautomatic pistols, including Smith & Wesson’s M&Ps, according to confidential tracing reports seen by Bloomberg News.

Canada’s firearm laws today are extensive, but critics and experts say they’re often arbitrary.

Guns are grouped into one of three categories, non-restricted, restricted and prohibited. But take a non-restricted hunting rifle, change the color of its grip or add accessories like an adjustable shoulder stock, and it may be prohibited even though it operates identically, gun retailers say. And while a license is required to own a gun, none is needed to import most parts such as barrels, slides and trigger assemblies, which with the help of a 3D printer can be assembled into fully functioning weapons.

Successive governments have used decrees — formally known as “orders-in-council” that bypass parliamentary debate — to add or withdraw firearms from the three categories. Trudeau did so in 2020 for the ban on 1,500 rifle models and in 2022 for the handgun freeze.

The system has alienated many gun owners: “You’ve jumped through all the hoops, you’ve been vetted, you’ve done everything to participate,” says Wes Winkel, president of Ellwood Epps Sporting Goods, a major independent firearm retailer. “It’s the most maddening thing.”

With Trudeau’s latest proposal, Bill-C21, he seeks to enshrine his handgun decree into law and to create an “evergreen” definition of banned military-style semiautomatic rifles that would prevent gunmakers from tweaking designs to get around Canada’s rules. The proposed legislation is expected to pass this fall. Trudeau’s office referred questions to Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, whose spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Conservative Party’s Poilievre, the most significant political rival Trudeau has yet faced, has pledged to rewrite the gun classification system. “They’ve been unpredictable and they’ve not been based on what a gun does, but on how it looks,” he said at the “Stick to Your Guns” dinner last year. “This is made-for-Hollywood show business, not public safety.”

In places like Regina, Saskatchewan’s provincial capital, the stakes for figuring out effective regulations are only getting higher.

When Evan Bray joined the Regina police force almost three decades ago, the department fielded only a handful of firearms-related calls in a month. When he retired earlier this summer as its chief, his officers were fielding six a day.

Bray says Canada needs to do a fuller job of tracing the origins of crime guns. As semiautomatic rifles proliferate in Canada, no one knows exactly how many long guns exist in the country thanks to the registry’s destruction a decade ago.

Tracing is one area where Canadian gun advocates disagree with their US counterparts. “We think more resources should be allocated to firearm tracing and a more detailed approach be deployed,” Giltaca said. “The issues at stake on both sides of the gun debate are too important to be influenced with inaccurate data.”

In Regina, gang wars engulf inner-city neighborhoods and sawed-off rifles are often the weapon of choice, according to police. What little tracing is done shows that weapons are only rarely smuggled from the US. It’s far easier to steal them, obtain them secondhand or find a straw buyer in a region where hunting, recreational shooting and gun stores are a part of daily life.

“Tracing is about telling a story. Tracing tells us, where did the gun come from? How did it get to where it got to?” Bray says. “Because often what tracing can show is that this gun came from a legal gun owner at one point, but somehow transferred hands.”

Up in La Ronge, authorities say gangs are infiltrating a tightly knit community, use of drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine is on the rise, and on average a woman shows up every other day at the local shelter to escape violence. Guns don’t cause those problems, but they can make them more lethal.

They have another effect that’s harder to quantify, yet for people like 21-year-old Branden Smith it’s no less real. When police searched for the armed men during the lockdown last summer, Smith had rushed to draw down the shutters of a local grocery store he was supervising. “I never imagined something like that could happen here,” he said. “Honestly, people were scared.”

Roberts, the Indigenous elder, said the combination of guns, gangs and drugs has fueled the fears of longtime residents. He never thought twice about leaving his home unattended or picking up a hitchhiker. Today, he wouldn’t dare. “You really have to watch your back,” he says.

(Updates with additional information on number of shooting crimes in the chart labeled “More Guns, More Shootings.”)

Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates gun-safety measures, is backed by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

Editors: Flynn McRoberts, Jason Grotto and John Voskuhl

Methodology:

Bloomberg analyzed crime and trade data from Statistics Canada, the Canadian national statistical agency.

To examine the trade value and volume of centerfire semiautomatic rifles and pistols, reporters relied on the 10-digit Harmonized Tariff Schedule codes. The analysis excluded military weapons, which have different codes. Bloomberg calculated per-capita gun import rates by country, using 2022 population data from the United Nations and additional trade data from the US Census Bureau.

To measure the number of shootings, reporters used the “discharge firearm with intent” category in the crime data.

In some of the most violent countries in the world, the Commerce Department has a mandate to help US gunmakers hunt for new customers.

By Jessica Brice, Michael Smith and Christopher Cannon

For several days each January, some 52,000 gunmakers, dealers and enthusiasts flood a 2 million-square-foot convention center near the Las Vegas Strip. They come from all parts of the globe for the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show, better known as SHOT Show. It’s the world’s biggest firearms industry event and as much party as it is trade expo, with a buffet of weaponry, gun influencers livestreaming in a dozen languages and models with AR-15s propped on their shoulders. The big producers, such as Glock Inc. and Smith & Wesson Brands Inc., host lavish dinners; the startups rent penthouses for boozy bashes.

Through this maze of 2,500 exhibitors and up an escalator is a collection of quieter spaces, including one called the International Trade Center. With its partition walls and stackable burgundy chairs, it lacks the flash of most other SHOT Show attractions. But to the US firearms industry, it’s a vital gateway to sales beyond American borders. Inside, foreign buyers can cut deals with US gunmakers in glass-walled conference rooms or at big round tables. Interpreters mill about, offering free translation services.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the industry group that runs SHOT Show, provides the space, but this is a US Department of Commerce operation. In 2013, Commerce agreed to start hosting people from around the world at SHOT Show as part of its International Buyer Program, an effort to boost exports of various US products by promoting stateside trade shows. The NSSF considered the move a “crucial” step in a multiyear plan to bring in more overseas business, according to a decade-old NSSF blog still lingering online. In the first year of the partnership, Commerce’s Foreign Commercial Service, which operates out of US embassies and consulates, steered 370 buyers to SHOT Show. By January 2023, that number had jumped to more than 3,200.

The global network of Foreign Commercial Service employees has effectively become a combination SHOT Show travel agency, gun industry promotion service and deal brokerage. “The assistance we get from the Commerce Department, especially at SHOT Show, is invaluable,” says Luis Guerra, founder and chief executive officer of Armaq SA, a Peruvian gun importer and retailer. To make his point, he presents a printout from the 2023 show, listing dozens of appointments with suppliers he says the department helped him set up. “You really can’t be in this business without that help,” he says.

In recent years, Commerce employees overseas have organized group trips to Las Vegas from South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In interviews, invitees of the US government detailed how Commerce officials booked flights and hotels for Guatemalan firearms shops, scored discounted Cirque du Soleil tickets for Brazilian importers, provided matchmaking services for Peruvian buyers and helped rush through a visa approval for a politician in Brazil’s “bullet caucus,” a band of National Congress members focused on fighting for gun rights. US lobbying groups and companies fill out the foreign attendee ranks by flying in activists and influencers. The NSSF offers them all training sessions on how to start grassroots gun-rights campaigns and dominate social media. The NSSF didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.

The partnership has been particularly successful in Latin America. In Peru, a lobbying group for hunters’ rights spent almost a decade mentoring and financing the advocate who helped mold gun-rights legislation in the image of US laws. In Brazil, starting in 2015, US activists and lobbyists cultivated ties with a little-known lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro. By early 2019, Bolsonaro had become president, and within two weeks of his swearing-in he began scrapping the country’s restrictive gun laws, blowing open one of the world’s biggest potential markets. The pro-gun ambitions and rhetoric of popular lawmakers in Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador can also be traced to US ties and events.

There have been setbacks. In Brazil, a returning president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, rolled back gun rights; in Peru, firearms shipments were frozen after the US Department of State raised concerns about civil unrest and possible human-rights violations, according to export license documents. Nonetheless, the blossoming of American-style gun culture—the elevation of gun ownership as a personal and political identifier, the social interaction at gun events, the framing of public debate over any restriction as a step toward oppression—portends a shift in voter sentiment and an overall increased tolerance of more firearms. The number of pro-gun lawmakers in Brazil’s Congress has surged to more than 100 since the early 2000s, when Bolsonaro was the lone deputy making the pro-gun agenda his priority.

This is what the National Rifle Association meant when a top executive in January 2021 touted the power of “quiet diplomacy” to rewrite the foreign political landscape and change public opinion. It’s a long game. And it’s working.

In 2014, the first year the Commerce Department partnered with SHOT Show, Thomas Saldias, an avid bird hunter from Peru, used the occasion to announce a new pro-gun lobbying group—the Latin American Legal Guns Coalition, or CALL, for its Spanish acronym. Firearm ownership across Central and South America “is under coordinated attack,” said Saldias in a statement released ahead of a news conference. Activists need to join forces, the statement said, to fight gun bans “being pushed by deep-pocketed international organizations.” His words that day had been carefully reviewed by a different sort of deep-pocketed organization: Safari Club International, the NRA ally that had taught Saldias the art of lobbying against gun control, American-style. Today, Peru has some of the most permissive gun laws in the Americas. In a nation haunted by a history of coups, narcoterrorism and violent crime, the liberalization of gun laws has marked a substantial win for the industry.

Saldias was in his late 30s in 2005, when he went to Texas A&M University to study for a doctorate in wildlife sciences. The hunting culture he saw in the US—regulated and with access to millions of acres of national parks—left him in awe. He dreamed of bringing that way of life back to Peru. He emailed the Safari Club asking for help and quickly got a call from Norbert Ullmann, director of the organization’s international division.

Saldias says his education in the American art of lobbying was hastened later with an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington for Safari Club’s annual convention. One morning Ullman invited him to join the group on a visit to Congress. He watched as volunteers fanned out across the US Capitol, knocking on lawmakers’ doors and asking them to support a regulatory tweak. Saldias can’t recall what rule it was now, but he remembers his astonishment at how effective a grassroots pressure campaign could be. “We just didn’t have that custom in Peru,” he says.

It wasn’t long before Saldias was banging on doors himself. Peru’s 2011 presidential election was won by Ollanta Humala, a left-leaning army commander who wanted to crack down on crime by banning most gun ownership. By then, Saldias was Safari Club’s Latin America representative, a volunteer position that came with a small stipend. He clocked legislative win after win, first helping to persuade lawmakers in Peru’s Congress to expand gun rights, then lobbying to open up the market to higher calibers and different types of guns. Civilians with a clean criminal record can now buy just about any level of firepower they want in Peru, short of a machine gun. “For sure, he learned the ropes in America, and he introduced this US attitude to South America,” says Ullmann, who’s since left Safari Club.

CALL went international at the 2014 SHOT Show news conference. Then, that June, at a truly global scene: the United Nations in New York. Saldias remembers stopping to collect his thoughts and calm his nerves before testifying at the biannual meeting of the UN program to fight the illicit trade of small arms. Representatives from scores of countries watched, while interpreters in glass booths translated the proceedings into Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. Saldias spoke for three minutes, saying his group would give a voice to millions of gun owners. “The truth is that a lot of the advocates here propose disarming civilians and penalizing law-abiding gun owners,” he said. “We are here to keep that legal right.” Sitting at a long table, he was in the company of some of the most powerful gun lobbyists in the world, including NRA executive James Baranowski.

It was Baranowski who later told the NRA board about the organization’s quiet diplomacy. “While our efforts are often in the shadows,” he said, according to board minutes released as part of a court case, “our results … can be seen and heard around the world.” One of its greatest successes, he told them, was persuading President Donald Trump to withdraw from a UN treaty regulating small arms sales—the kind of restrictions Saldias had testified against. Baranowski, the NRA and Safari Club International declined to comment for this story.

For invitees of the US government, the road to SHOT Show can start thousands of miles from the Vegas Strip, at defense and security events where Foreign Commercial Service workers scout foreign buyers to add to their show rosters. In Brazil, that task falls to Genard Burity, a Rio de Janeiro native who’s been peddling Made-in-the-USA for almost a quarter-century—including software, Boeing planes and American movies. In recent years, guns have also become a big part of the job.

Burity is part of a network of about 675 local hires at embassies and consulates around the world who make up the US government’s sales team abroad. American officers rotating in and out on two-year stints call the shots, but locals like Burity, whose title is specialist, know all the right people. “Their job is to work with any and all American companies and talk about what they can do to sell their products in Brazil and elsewhere,” said Anton Kemps, a US Department of Defense official, on a recent trade mission to Brazil.

How exactly they do that is a secret, classified by Commerce as confidential commercial information. At a four-day defense expo in Rio in April, the consulate provided a full rundown of State and Defense department employees in attendance, but declined to name Commerce employees there, even though Burity and two of his American bosses were visibly present. Burity declined to comment for this article, as did the US consulate in Rio, the US Embassy in Brasília and the Commerce Department.

By piecing together Burity’s movements over several months earlier this year, via interviews with people he met and emails sent from the embassy to gun importers, it’s possible to get a sense for how the US government’s chief business promoters operate on foreign soil. During the Rio defense expo, Burity touched base with contacts old and new. He introduced Brazilian deal brokers to US makers of armed boats and rifles favored by SWAT teams. He checked in with the biggest importer of Smith & Wesson weapons, to whom he introduces US firearms dealers every couple of months. And he spent two hours talking to Sig Sauer’s local rep, a bulked-up salesman who wanted Burity to put pressure on his bosses to fight Lula’s gun restrictions.

In the months before and after the April event, Burity and embassy staff helped push through paperwork and licenses for 30,000 Springfield Armory handguns going to São Paulo prisons and 500 Sig Sauer rifles for Rio’s police. Burity set up a meeting between a Brazilian pro-gun lobbying group and embassy officers. He also gave feedback on the prototype of a new magazine modeled after an NRA periodical.

Gunmakers doing business in Brazil say the help they get from the Foreign Commercial Service is key. “I run all my deals past Genard whenever I do business,” says Luiz Horta, international sales director for Springfield Armory. “We’re old friends.”

Burity is one of at least two dozen specialists listed on the SHOT Show website and stationed in Africa, Asia, Europe or South America who leads foreign buyers to the event each year, along with a range of other trade expos, including an event in Denver in May on robotics and drones. Save-the-date notices go out months in advance. As the show approaches, embassy staff encourage invitees to use a State Department app to book meetings with US gunmakers and dealers eager to fill their orders. It’s unclear how much time and money the Commerce Department spends on activities tied to SHOT Show each year. When the agency didn’t turn over spending documents in response to public records requests, Bloomberg News filed a lawsuit in May to get access to the information; the suit is ongoing.

SHOT Show, of course, isn’t the only expo Commerce works with. The International Buyer Program brings thousands of foreign professionals each year to a range of events, for industries as diverse as concrete, dental equipment and electronics. But none of them blends business and political activism like SHOT Show does. Federal law prohibits government employees from using their position to favor specific candidates or a political party, but it’s hard to argue SHOT Show isn’t a partisan event. The NSSF, whose annual lobbying expenditure has overtaken that of the NRA, has said it gets more than 75% of its annual budget from the event. The NSSF contributed to the campaigns of 256 national candidates in the 2021-2022 election cycle. Four were Democrats.

While the NRA has historically presented itself as the voice of gun owners, the NSSF represents companies. Finding new customers is a key part of its mission. Its Big City Tours project aimed to persuade urbanites and minorities to pick up guns; its +One Movement urged social shooters to bring a friend to the range; and marketing materials such as an article titled “Not Just Pink Products” offered tips on how to win over women. In a 2020 study, the NSSF touted the success of such efforts: a 56% increase in gun purchases among Black Americans, compared with 2019, as well as 8 million first-time gun buyers. Women accounted for 40% of all sales.

But the push for international buyers was different. Strict regulations meant US manufacturers couldn’t simply export guns the same way they shipped, say, car parts or toilet paper. For decades, almost all guns sold abroad fell under the same export controls as sensitive military equipment. Thousands of items sat on the so-called Munitions List, requiring State Department approval on every export license, congressional notification on deals worth more than $1 million and limits on technology sharing.

The Obama administration originally proposed overhauling the list to free up State Department resources and cut red tape for US companies. The State Department would keep oversight of the heavy-duty and highly deadly—the rocket-propelled missiles, the flamethrowers, the fighter jets and submarines. The Commerce Department would take everything else, from night vision goggles to parts for satellites. It was up to a Washington lawyer named Kevin Wolf, Commerce’s assistant secretary for export administration from 2010 to 2017, to figure out where pistols and rifles belonged.

Wolf is a pragmatist who’s spent his career moving between government desks and law firms. “When I arrived, as an export control agency we were spending most of our time reviewing and approving parts going to allies,” he said recently from his home office, where portraits of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden hang on his wall. “All our resources were spent approving things we’d been approving for decades.”

In his proposed executive order, Obama left in a requirement that Congress be notified before large gun shipments were approved. The State Department would also keep veto power. The Obama administration had been set to formally propose the shift of firearms oversight when, in December 2012, a 20-year-old gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and murdered 26 people, 20 of them children. No one wanted to go near the issue, Wolf recalls, so he stowed the proposal in a government-issued yellow folder on a bookshelf in the hallway outside his office at the Commerce Department, where it sat until Obama’s term in office ran out. “I just dumped it at the bottom of the list,” Wolf says. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe, you know, if Hillary wins, we’ll pick it back up.’ ”

Hillary Clinton didn’t win the presidency, and Trump’s inauguration, on Jan. 20, 2017, coincided with the annual SHOT Show, where he’d been a keynote speaker the year before. Big screens were set up across the expo center, broadcasting the ceremony as crowds cheered.

Wolf had moved on to legal consulting at law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, and Larry Keane, the NSSF’s top lobbyist, quickly hired him as a strategic adviser. Wolf says he still believes the shift to Commerce was the right move, mainly because that department has more enforcement resources than State and because requests for export licenses by Commerce would trigger multi-agency notifications. He says he was frustrated with how the Trump administration hyped the change as a way to boost gun exports, but he had no say over its final form. “It was no longer my job,” he says. Wolf, who isn’t a lobbyist, says he has hundreds of legal consulting clients, mainly in semiconductors. “I don’t work for the gun industry other than, you know, Larry calling me up for thoughts and advice,” he says. Keane declined to comment.

When the switch from State to Commerce finally took effect, in March 2020, the NSSF rushed to alert its members. Keane, in a blog post, called it a “crucial milestone” for US manufacturers. The move eliminated congressional notification. It drastically cut fees, which inspired scores of small companies to jump into the global market. And it eliminated the requirement for order-by-order approval, which cut the time it took to get an export license by more than half. The NSSF started offering training courses on the new regime at SHOT Show. For $150, would-be exporters can access a five-part webinar on the NSSF website in which Wolf himself explains the system.

The industry’s decade-long push to win over international markets was finally set to take off. From March 2020 to June 2021, the Commerce Department approved almost $16 billion in firearms export licenses—a 30% increase from historical averages, according to congressional estimates.

Biden, who’s said fighting US gun violence is a key issue, has not significantly tightened export licensing requirements, though his administration has partially reinstated the congressional notification requirement for some semiautomatic weapons. “American foreign policy has become much more focused on the economics,” says Jon Michaels, a professor at the UCLA School of Law who’s written extensively about the relationship between government and private industry. He called Biden’s inaction surprising. “There are very few levers that the Biden administration has to regulate guns—very few spigots to shut off—and this seems like an obvious one.”

A martial artist, a lawyer and a priest walk into a gun club. They’re all social media stars, and they’re at the Top Gun Shooting Range in Florianópolis, Brazil, to promote a sharpshooting competition. But in the world of guns, it’s impossible to separate the product from the politics. All conversations among the 100 gun enthusiasts here eventually turn to the question on everyone’s mind: What now?

Months earlier, on his first day in office, Lula had shut down one of the gun world’s most promising markets. New ownership licenses were frozen. Cargoes of weapons and ammo at warehouses in Florida, Georgia and Texas were denied entry. Anyone who’d purchased guns under the previous administration was given 60 days to re-register their arms in a national database.

The swing from the policies of his predecessor was extreme. Bolsonaro, with close ties to the NRA, was the politician the lobby had always dreamed of. His gun market overhaul fueled an almost 600% surge in licensed owners and dramatically expanded what calibers and models civilians had access to. But Bolsonaro’s legacy won’t be as the president who pumped an overwhelming number of firearms into Brazil. The nation was already flush with weapons, many of them illegal, long before he took office. The most important thing he did, says Clovis Cesar de Aguiar Jr., owner of the ISA shooting range outside São Paulo, was send a message: “He simply communicated to citizens of this country they had a right to own a weapon.”

Bolsonaro’s true gift to the industry will be a proliferation of gun clubs in the mold of Top Gun and ISA, which helped unite a diverse group of shooters under a single pro-gun banner. During his presidency, the number of gun stores doubled, to 3,200. By his final year, a shooting range a day was opening up. (A month after the Top Gun gathering, Lula would sign a decree taking gun restrictions even further and aiming to force the closure of hundreds of ranges. The decree is being challenged in court.)

The network of gun clubs now operating across Brazil taps into a strategy the US industry has long known as its most valuable: emphasizing face-to-face gatherings. It’s why the NSSF holds so many in-person meetings—SHOT Show in January, a members visit to Congress in April, an expo for shooting ranges in Wisconsin in July, a conference for exporters and ATF officials in Washington in August. The NRA and Safari Club hold almost as many national meetups.

But the small on-the-ground events at shooting ranges form the backbone of gun culture in the US, and advocates in Latin America are re-creating that. “Unfortunately, some people, and specifically this government, they have no idea what it means to spend a weekend at a shooting range—the emotion, the importance,” Salesio Nuhs, CEO of Taurus Armas SA, the biggest Brazilian maker of guns, tells the crowd gathered at Top Gun as he sits on a tufted leather couch atop a stage erected for the occasion. In front of him are a film and sound crew, and behind them, on the back wall, giant American and Brazilian flags hang side by side. Over the next 12 hours, during a YouTube livestream to promote the upcoming competition, set to take place at 1,500 shooting ranges across Brazil, every type of pro-gun personality will cross the stage, sit in the Top Gun podcasting booth or participate in mini-challenges at the range.

There’s the mixed martial artist Thiago Santos, known as Marreta (Portuguese for “sledgehammer”), for whom shooting is a rare opportunity for alpha male bonding. “That’s exactly why we’re here, so that people can come and get to know the industry,” he says. “How pleasant it is to meet up with your friends, go to the range, practice shooting and exchange ideas, right?” The lawyer Luciano Lara draws parallels between the US Second Amendment and Brazil’s Constitution, which guarantees the right to life in one of the most violent nations in the world. “We must have the means to enforce that guarantee,” he says. And the priest Edivaldo Ferreira says the Bible demands that a man protect his family. Joining them is Edilaine Mansueto, a shooting instructor who says guns make women safer. It’s “one of the great equalizers,” she says.

The gathering is organic, the movement homegrown. There are no US industry lobbyists lurking in the corner or clearing speeches. They really don’t need to be there. Nuhs, who’s traveled to SHOT Show every year for three decades, says the gun culture in Brazil is now self-sustaining and getting stronger. “It’s not as simple as just bringing American gun culture here,” he says. Brazilians are ready to carry the flag themselves. “Once you create that culture, there’s no going back.”

That appears to be true in Peru as well. Guerra, the importer who’s been to SHOT Show several times with US government help, says the American pause on exports to Peru has merely meant his business now goes to other countries. Saldias also has a story showing how entrenched Peru’s gun culture is. In early August, the country’s version of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives quietly proposed rolling back gun ownership rights. As soon as he got wind of it, Saldias says, he started working the phones. He secured $3,000 from Peruvian gun importers to cover a trip to Lima. There, he spent two weeks lobbying Congress and successfully squashed the effort before it could gain momentum.

“I didn’t need Safari Club’s help this time,” Saldias says. “I already knew what to do.”

Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates gun-safety measures, is backed by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

With assistance from: Eric Fan, Michael Riley and David Kocieniewski

Editors: Flynn McRoberts, Daniel Ferrara and Jason Grotto

Methodology:

For this story, Latin America is defined as Mexico and the countries in Central America and South America. To determine US exports of semiautomatic firearms to Latin America, Bloomberg analyzed export data from the US Census Bureau from 2005 through 2022 and relied on the 10-digit Harmonized Tariff Schedule codes. The analysis excluded military rifles, which have different codes.

International smugglers can buy online almost all the American-made parts they need to build untraceable assault rifles. Now criminal groups are often better armed than authorities patrolling the ganglands of Latin America.

By Bloomberg News

On an unusually cool Miami afternoon, alleged international arms smuggler Teodoro Giovan de Oliveira and a gunrunner met near the entrance of a fishing gear store to plot their next big deal.

For months, Oliveira had been lying low, spooked by the bust of a competitor in the illicit Florida-to-Brazil weapons trade, according to a law enforcement document that captured details of their December 2017 conversation. His clients were getting impatient. As jetliners passed overhead on their approach to Miami International Airport, Oliveira explained to his associate — a trafficker-turned-federal informant — how he planned to fill orders for assault rifles while avoiding the fate of his rival: He’d ship everything in pieces.

“Maybe it takes longer, but the guns will get to their destination,” Oliveira said, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security summary of the encounter seen by Bloomberg News. “That’s what matters.”

In a phone interview this week, Oliveira denied ever being involved in gun trafficking. But the summary and allegations from Brazilian authorities portray him as a pioneer in an emerging trend in international smuggling. In several South American countries, criminals are dealing in parts rather than whole guns, tapping into a fad among US enthusiasts who assemble AR-15-style rifles from a smorgasbord of easily available components. They’re also exploiting a regulatory gap that’s uniquely American: The purchase of almost all such pieces is entirely unregulated within US borders.

If he’d wanted to buy a complete AR-15, Oliveira would have needed to walk into a licensed gun store and pass an FBI background check. But to make one, he simply could go online to buy nearly every part needed and have them shipped anywhere in the US. The lack of rules means that international criminal groups can legally buy gun components in bulk without any scrutiny. Oliveira and others have sent parts to a vacation rental or even a Comfort Inn in Orlando, according to investigative files. It’s all perfectly legal — until the parts are smuggled out of the country.

“Nowhere else in the world can you just go online and buy pieces like this,” said a Paraguayan gun importer in an interview in Asunción. He asked not to be identified speaking about the illicit gun trade. “People in the market for this stuff, they know exactly what the rules are.”

Under those rules, the only component that’s regulated — meaning the maker must stamp it with its name and a serial number and the buyer must pass a background check — is a roughly 4-by-8 inch piece of metal called the lower receiver, which holds the gun together.

International traffickers are swapping out high-quality lower receivers with untraceable versions made of hardened plastic or with ones designed for air guns, as demonstrated by recent police seizures in a growing number of cases in South America and the Caribbean. Some have been able to operate in the US for years without being detected. Even when they’re caught, they often face light penalties.

Arms traffickers operating this way are now the main source of assault rifles for some of the world’s largest and most brutal criminal gangs, including Brazil’s PCC and Red Command. They’re also supplying drug cartels in Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador, authorities say. Brazilian cops have a name for the menacing, DIY weapons: Frankenstein guns.

A Bloomberg News investigation this year documented how the federal government has helped US gunmakers boost their legal exports to countries that are ill-equipped to handle the surge in weapons. The growing business of gun parts exposes another failure: Weak US rules governing that market are making some of the world’s most dangerous places even deadlier.

Sprawling Supply Chain

In one trafficking case, known as Florida Heat, smugglers operated from 2017 until 2022. Investigative files show the group shipped parts from at least seven US-based manufacturers into Brazil.

Note: There’s no indication that US parts makers or dealers knew their products were being illegally sent abroad.

The parts makers can sell directly to customers or through online retailers. Websites MidwayUSA.com and CheaperThanDirt.com were favorites of the smugglers. None of the retailers broke any laws.

Parts can ship freely to anywhere in the US with no special scrutiny. Once in Miami, the pieces were removed from their packaging and hidden in shipments of clothes, smartphones and printers, then smuggled by air or sea to Amazonas state, and trucked to Rio.

Andrei Serbin Pont, a Buenos Aires-based researcher studying the explosion in parts smuggling, has traced parts from dozens of other rifle seizures in Latin America back to US makers.

In March, a cache of 13 assault rifles was seized near Rio after a firefight that killed the leader of a gang accused of assassinating 40 police officers and public security agents. The confiscated guns were sent to Cidade da Polícia, or Police City, a massive law enforcement complex that sits at the intersection of three favelas. There, forensics specialists searched in vain for serial numbers.

The weapons included AR-10s, a heavy version of the AR-15 capable of piercing bulletproof glass and body armor. “Based on previous experience and the total absence of markings, it’s likely the seized weapon was built by organized crime using generic pieces obtained in large part from the United States,” the forensics report concluded.

There’s no indication that any US parts makers or dealers know their products are being smuggled abroad by criminal groups.

Every few years, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sends agents to Rio to train officers on trace requests. Traces use serial numbers to help investigators determine where in the supply chain a weapon was diverted into criminals’ hands. When the agents last visited, in August, Rodrigo Barros, then the chief of the weapons forensics unit, had some blunt feedback.

“I told them, ‘Look, tracking these rifles using your system works when you’ve got whole weapons. But nowadays, that’s not what we’re up against,’” Barros recalled in an interview. “They didn’t really have an answer for what we should do. Their response was that it’s not just in Rio. It’s not just Brazil. It’s everywhere.”

Engineered as a military rifle in the late 1950s by a company called ArmaLite, the AR-15 was built from dozens of replaceable components, making it easier for soldiers with minimal training to strip, clean and swap out parts. That dramatically increased the rifle’s longevity in the field.

It also posed a challenge following passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The first such legislation in decades, the new law required that one part in every firearm sold in the US be engraved with the manufacturer’s name and a serial number. In a pistol, that’s the frame; in a rifle, it’s the receiver.

“The ATF had to pick a part of each firearm to determine whether or not that would constitute either the frame or the receiver of that firearm,” said Mark Collins, director of federal policy at Brady: United Against Gun Violence, an advocacy group. On an AR-15 — and the many rifles based on its design — “the lower receiver has this beautiful faceplate where you can very obviously engrave serial numbers and identification markings.”

But regulating the AR-15 solely through its lower receiver was problematic from the beginning. The rifle actually has two receivers, one lower and one upper, and the firing pin is in the upper receiver. The lower receiver holds the trigger mechanism and hammer, but both those can be purchased separately — and without a background check — as parts. What’s left, the housing of the receiver, can be forged using 3D printers or machining equipment, or swapped out with a seemingly harmless air-gun part.

The AR-15: Dissecting a Gun Control Gap

The AR-15 has become popular in the US in part because gun enthusiasts can easily customize and upgrade the weapon. Only one of its parts is regulated, and traffickers are exploiting that regulatory gap to avoid background checks.

The lower receiver is the only component that must have a traceable serial number. To avoid that requirement, this roughly 4-by-8-inch piece can be forged using machining equipment or 3D printers — or swapped out with air-gun parts, which are unregulated. The lower receiver holds the trigger mechanism and hammer, pieces that can be bought as part of an unregulated build kit.

The upper receiver contains some of the most important gun parts, including the firing pin and bolt carrier group, which automatically reloads a bullet into the chamber. It’s where the round is fired and where the barrel is attached. If it’s a flat-top upper, a scope can also be mounted on it.

The barrel is one of the most difficult parts to make, and can’t be made from computerized routing machines. Spiral grooves are created as part of the rifling process, which makes barrels one of the most expensive components. It’s also why many countries other than the US regulate barrels.

An optional component prohibited in many states with assault-rifle restrictions, the compensator threads onto the end of the barrel. By cutting down muzzle rise, it makes the rifle easier to fire accurately.

Magazines hold the rounds. Some states limit the magazine size, often to 10 rounds. But magazines available online and in gun stores in states without restrictions can hold far more.

Like other add-ons or upgrades, these parts make AR-15-style rifles more accurate and, as a result, potentially deadlier. Quality of sights can vary widely, with prices exceeding $1,000 while forward grips can go for as little as $12.

Once the US assault weapons ban expired in 2004, the rifle’s modular design meant that enthusiasts could assemble, modify and upgrade it right out of their garages, and firearms manufacturers began pushing the AR-15 as a DIY rifle. Consumers now can purchase handguards, receivers and stocks in a variety of styles and colors. Thousands of factories around the country are using computerized milling machines about the size of a small SUV to churn out rifle parts and sell them online.

Even established manufacturers have shifted their business model. Anderson Manufacturing, based in Hebron, Kentucky, makes a popular but relatively cheap AR-15 nicknamed “the poor man’s pony” because it’s considered nearly as good as Colt’s — and both companies use an equine motif. In 2016, Anderson produced more than 453,000 finished rifles and no receivers for individual sale, federal data show. Four years later, the company made a mere 22,500 complete rifles but 440,000 receivers.

Some criminal gangs prefer the reliability of professionally manufactured lower receivers — and traffickers are happy to oblige. Smuggled receivers have been discovered hidden in shipping containers, parcels, even cereal boxes. Anderson-made lower receivers have shown up in major seizures recently in Chile and Ecuador, both as smuggled parts and assembled into high-powered rifles bound for drug cartels.

“We want to make it clear that we don’t produce anything with ill intent,” said a spokesman at Anderson who declined to give his full name. “We follow US guidelines and work closely with the ATF to ensure our parts don’t end up in the wrong hands. If that does happen, it’s the result of something further down the line.”

When lawmakers passed the 1968 law, assault rifles weren’t a popular commercial item. Since the DIY market for them took off in the past decade, gun-part makers have fought in court to keep the regulatory gap open. Some, including Texas-based EP Armory, tout on their websites the use of their products to avoid current gun regulation.

To address public safety concerns, the Justice Department updated the definition of the term firearm last year to make clear that parts kits designed to build “functional weapons” are subject to the same federal laws as traditional firearms, said ATF spokesperson Kristina Mastropasqua. Still, parts kits that don’t include the lower receiver aren’t regulated, even though they’re designed to go into a functional weapon.

Few people know the consequences of this regulatory scheme better than Elvis Corrales, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent in Miami. Corrales specializes in what’s known as counter proliferation, which combats the smuggling of sensitive US technology abroad — items such as computer chips and aircraft parts.

“It’s ease of access, it’s that simple,” Corrales said of gun parts. “You can go online and there are a slew of companies selling these components.” He said 80% of his work in Miami involves gun trafficking.

Six years ago, those trafficking cases exploded, as armed groups across South and Central America shifted from bribing police and military officials for diverted guns in their own countries to smuggling directly from the US. Initially, the cases involved caches of whole weapons. But soon the criminals figured out how easy it was to acquire assault-rifle parts and smuggle them in small parcels through commercial-freight carriers, mailed packages and even inside the luggage of accomplices visiting the US on tourist visas.

In October 2018, an inspector at the international mail facility near Miami got lucky while scanning two Argentina-bound packages labeled as used sporting goods. Inside were barrels, bolt carriers, pistol grips, gas tubes and trigger kits — enough parts to make more than twenty AR-15 assault rifles.

That one shipment eventually led authorities to a massive trafficking network that spanned the US, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. Working with Argentine national police, Homeland Security agents spent the next year uncovering it in an operation code-named Patagonia Express. The guns were assembled in clandestine labs in and around Buenos Aires, then smuggled into Paraguay in a military van the traffickers had purchased at auction, authorities say.

The smuggling was coordinated directly by the PCC, one of the world’s largest criminal gangs. Members in some cases bought what they needed directly on the internet, then had the parts shipped to Brazilian nationals living in Florida. In June 2019, Corrales flew to Argentina and accompanied agents as they conducted raids across 50 sites, seizing an armory’s worth of weapons.

It was the largest arms seizure in Argentine history. An Argentine official, who asked not to be identified, agreed that the case was a success but said that parts for hundreds of rifles had already slipped through by the time the first shipment was caught. “This also shows how big the problem really is.”

It takes 65 to 100 parts and a couple of hours to build a working AR-15. Ronnie Lessa learned how by watching videos on YouTube and consulting online blueprints. A convicted arms trafficker and former Rio police sergeant, Lessa searched for components almost every day on US websites using his smartphone, according to a police analysis of his online activity that included purchasing orders.

He bought rail clamps for scopes using the pay site Shopify and had them sent to a brick home in Atlanta, where a young relative was staying with a family who hosted foreign students. He bought IMI Defense folding stock adapters from Rguns.net, an online retailer in Illinois, using a service called Shipito that lets international shoppers rent a US billing address.

And he bought dozens of upper receivers made by South Carolina-based American Tactical that he shipped to a Comfort Inn in Orlando, to a fake name in Miami, and to an adobe-style home in Pompano Beach, Florida. That house is just down the road from Oliveira, the same alleged smuggler Homeland Security agents had already been watching.

No one ever caught on — until Lessa allegedly assassinated a Rio councilwoman and her driver in a March 2018 drive-by shooting that shocked even the crime-ridden city.

When Brazilian police arrested Lessa a year later and raided two properties in his name, they found gun-smithing equipment and parts for 117 assault rifles, according to investigative files, which included an inventory of the search. The murder weapon wasn’t there — police suspect it had been dumped in the ocean — but forensics show the bullets that pierced Councilwoman Marielle Franco’s cheek, eyebrow, ear and skull came from a 9mm submachine gun.

Lessa is serving a minimum of 13 years in a Brazilian prison for weapons trafficking and destroying evidence; he’s awaiting the conclusion of his trial for Franco’s killing. His lawyers say he’s not guilty and was at a bar when the crime was committed.

Illicit workshops like the one Lessa was running in a dingy apartment with no stove or fridge are showing up across Latin America, individual cells in a sprawling system that’s now pumping out thousands of assault rifles a year, according to Andrei Serbin Pont, a Buenos Aires-based researcher who combs social media posts and news reports to map the trend. Guns made by a gang that stamps its DIY assault rifles with a skull motif have been seized recently in Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, said Serbin Pont. Similar rifles have been taken from criminal groups and militias in Colombia, Ecuador, Haiti and Venezuela.

“I was browsing through my Twitter list for Brazil today, and all the rifles seized in the past 72 hours were AR rifles” assembled from components, Serbin Pont, who is president of the Regional Coordinator for Economic and Social Research, a think tank known by its Spanish acronym CRIES, said in late November. “These trafficking organizations have become very savvy at how they go about this.”

The influx of US-sourced gun parts is now a recurring theme on the local news in these countries. On the US side, even leading gun-control groups are unaware of the growing role that parts play in trafficking. Bloomberg reviewed almost 7,000 pages of documents related to 10 investigations into parts smuggling between the US and South America, including the cases against Lessa and Oliveira. Combined, the documents paint a picture of foreign cartels and criminal gangs whose members are setting down roots on US soil then openly and freely buying parts and smuggling them back home. Cases that are a matter of life and death in places where the guns are headed are often a low priority for federal prosecutors dealing with rampant gun violence in the US, details from those cases suggest.

Throughout 2019 and 2020, Homeland Security continued to feed intel on Oliveira and two of his partners in Florida to Brazil’s Federal Police, according to at least five letters sent by the US law enforcement agency to its counterpart abroad. One of the suspects, João Marcelo Lopes, had already been arrested and pleaded guilty to weapons smuggling in Fort Lauderdale in 2016. Brazilian police believe that he started sending gun parts south again almost as soon as he was released from jail the following year.

Authorities in Brazil allege that Oliveira’s ring smuggled hundreds of thousands of dollars of components by air and sea out of Miami. Rifle barrels, bolt carriers, triggers and frames were easily hidden in mailed parcels and southbound containers packed with designer clothing, smart phones and printers.

Oliveira told Bloomberg in an interview that he “never had a gun in my life.”

“They didn’t catch me doing anything,” he said. “I used to send a lot of phones to Brazil. They tried to link me to sending gun parts. I never did.”

The attorney who represented Lopes in the 2016 case didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Brazilian authorities tracked some of the shipments to Amazonas, a state in the country’s north, according to cargo records seen by Bloomberg. After arrival, the parts were assembled into whole rifles and sold in Rio. In 2022, Brazilian police raided several locations and charged four people as part of an operation known as Florida Heat.

Interpol issued so-called red notices urging US officials to detain Oliveira, Lopes and a third man, but they remained free in the US as recently as this week, according to one person familiar with the situation. Homeland Security officials declined to comment.

The Biden administration has sought to crack down on trafficking, but those efforts have centered on whole guns, most of them smuggled across the border to Mexico. An anti-trafficking law passed by Congress last year focuses only on smuggling whole guns or the lower receiver, an ATF official said.

The lower receiver is the one component that doesn’t show up on Oliveira and Lessa’s purchase histories, one indication of how easy it is for traffickers to find replacements. In at least some instances, Lessa allegedly substituted it with a modified Taiwanese lower receiver made for airguns, according to authorities and a purchasing order reviewed by Bloomberg.

When his attorneys argued that the alleged assassin was actually planning to open a shop selling airsoft guns in Brazil and that the part wouldn’t function as a real gun part, police assembled a working AR-15 using the air-gun receivers.

“Those rifles won’t last 10 years the way an AR-15 from one of the big manufacturers will, but they don’t have to,” Serbin Pont said. “The 17-year-old gang member shooting those rifles in favelas is going to get killed long before the rifle ever wears out.”

It’s a sweltering day at Cidade da Polícia, and Fabricio Oliveira is talking to a couple dozen cadets in a windowless classroom with water-damaged ceilings. Oliveira is chief of special operations at Rio’s civil police. The cadets call him Delegado Fabricio, which is the handle he uses on Instagram where he posts videos showing police helicopters being shot at or people brandishing AR-15s at the recent birthday party of a local gang leader.

“This is the most dangerous city in the world to be a police officer,” said Oliveira, who is not related to Teodoro Giovan de Oliveira, the alleged gun trafficker. “People think I’m exaggerating when I say it’s a war zone. Then they come here and see for themselves.”

A few weeks beforehand, he was part of a team sent in to rescue an officer shot during an ambush inside a favela. The bullet had struck the officer where his vest meets his shoulder. It took more than an hour for the rescue team to reach him in a black armored truck weighing 15 tons and riddled with scars where bullets had ricocheted off the thick steel.

At the center of the truck, a lookout sways in a hammock, poking his head through a fishbowl window and keeping an eye out for shooters among the scatter-shot brick buildings and burning tires put in the road to stop their advance. The glass he sits behind is 3.5 inches thick. It can withstand a couple of direct shots from an AR-15, but more than that and there are no guarantees.

“The bullet-proof vests and vehicles we use were designed to stop these bullets,” the police chief said. “But with what we’re seeing now, it can happen. It can break.”

From January 2018 through March 2023, more than 15,000 gun-related homicides occurred in Rio de Janeiro state, according to public data. That averages about eight a day — a quarter of them within Rio city limits. It’s a startling statistic in a nation where firearms are mostly illegal.

No one knows for sure how many of those homicides were committed by guns fashioned from smuggled parts — mainly because public safety groups have yet to catch on to the trend and police haven’t adjusted their record keeping. In other cases, the rifles look so close to the real thing that officers seizing the weapons may not even realize they’re homemade. What is clear is that the DIY rifle is quickly becoming the new model in Latin America.

“Criminal groups, more and more, they have better weapons than we do,” Oliveira said. “They buy everything separately — nothing with serial numbers — so we can’t even track it. But we can tell by the markings who makes it. It’s all coming from the US.”

Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates gun-safety measures, is backed by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

Defense Department gets paid about $30 million a year from sales of military-grade ammunition to civilians.

By David Kocieniewski

A US government-owned ammunition plant that made high-powered bullets used by civilian shooters in mass killings has generated tens of millions in cash for the Defense Department each year, according to interviews and documents compiled by Bloomberg News.

The Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Missouri, is run by a private company that sells about half its daily production of four million rounds of military-grade ammunition to civilians. Under the Pentagon’s agreement with its contractor — Winchester Ammunition Inc., a brand owned by Olin Corp. — the military gets a few pennies on each bullet sold to the public. Government officials have refused to disclose precisely how much federal revenue the sales generate, though one former senior Pentagon official and equity analysts who follow Olin agreed on an estimate: about $30 million a year. Bloomberg sued the Defense Department in May to obtain public records detailing its income from the plant. The suit is ongoing.

Lake City rounds, marked by the initials “LC” on their base, now comprise about a third of the US market for ammunition used in AR-15-style assault rifles. A review of federal and state records from courts and criminal investigations shows that Lake City’s bullets have been used in a wide array of violent offenses, including mass shootings at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and the Tops supermarket in Buffalo.

The plant’s products — including its cigar-sized, .50-caliber rounds, powerful enough to down a helicopter — also have surfaced at offshore crime scenes and in smugglers’ hauls bound for the Caribbean and Mexico.

A Bloomberg investigation this year revealed how the US government has fueled gun violence abroad, in part by increasing firearms exports even to countries plagued by corruption and violence. And the US Commerce Department has partnered with the leading gun manufacturers’ group to boost international attendance at its annual trade show. The Pentagon’s Lake City contract reflects an even deeper link, one in which the government itself makes money from products used in mass killings in the US and overseas.

According to ballistics reports obtained by Bloomberg, Lake City ammunition was used in the 2019 murders of nine members of three American Mormon families, including six children, who were ambushed by cartel gunmen while driving in Mexico an hour south of the US border.

Pentagon officials say the sales to civilians are intended to cut costs and, in case of war, preserve a surge capacity at the sprawling, 3,900-acre site just east of Kansas City. Winchester, which has operated the plant since October 2020, declined to comment, as did its parent company, Olin. Orbital ATK, the defense contractor that ran the plant from 2000 until 2020, is now owned by Northrop Grumman Corp., which declined to answer questions about commercial sales of Lake City bullets.

In federal documents circulated during the 2019 bidding for the $8 billion Lake City contract, the Defense Department suggested that the plant operator might pay 5% of commercial sales revenue, either in cash or company-funded improvements to the facility.

Bruce Jette, who oversaw the plant until 2021 as the Army’s assistant secretary for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, said Winchester also provides major savings to the federal treasury by defraying a significant chunk of the plant’s operating costs, which are hundreds of millions a year. During his final year in the Army, Jette launched a cost assessment study to calculate the total benefit Lake City provides to the US government. He left for the private sector before it was completed, and the military has refused to provide a copy to Bloomberg.

As the spread of high-powered weapons in recent decades has heightened concerns about gun violence on US streets, policy makers have occasionally tried to restrict the plant’s sales of some military-grade ammunition to civilians, mostly on the grounds that it can give criminals the firepower to pierce law enforcement officers’ body armor. The gun industry has blocked those efforts by rallying gun owners and members of Congress who fear ammunition shortages, higher prices and the elimination of some of the plant’s 1,700 jobs.

The vast majority of Lake City bullets sold to civilians, of course, aren’t involved in crimes. But links between Lake City ammunition and US mass shootings, first reported last weekend by The New York Times, have escaped scrutiny until now.

Mark Talley, whose mother, Geraldine, was one of 10 people fatally shot last May during the racially motivated attack at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, said he was “angry and saddened, but not surprised” to learn that the federal government had made money from bullets used in the massacres.

“It’s like they had their economists do the math,” said Talley, 34, who founded the group Agents for Advocacy to lobby for racial equality after the Tops shooting. “Hundreds, maybe thousands of civilians killed for millions of dollars a year. And it’s worth it to them.”

The Defense Department declined to answer questions about the government’s financial benefits from Lake City or the factory’s connection to civilian deaths. Two former Pentagon officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the department hadn’t authorized them to be interviewed, said military leaders had no qualms about providing consumers a product they can easily buy elsewhere. Given how much ammunition is available in the US, they say, it’s unrealistic to think that a ban of commercial sales from Lake City might significantly reduce killings.

In January, though, the first federal study of the firearms market in more than two decades found that the price of small arms ammunition more than doubled from 2000 to 2020, outpacing the price increase of guns by more than four-fold. And gun industry representatives themselves have argued that taking the plant’s products off the civilian market would make bullets for AR-15-style rifles scarcer and even more expensive.

Larry Keane, executive director of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), underscored that point last year when he told gun owners that the Biden administration was considering a ban on commercial sales of Lake City rounds. “That would potentially choke off over 30 percent of the ammunition used on AR-15 style rifles by law-abiding citizens,” Keane wrote.

Bullets are far easier to buy than guns in the US. The Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, banned machine gun sales, but dropped requirements that ammunition merchants have a license and keep records of their sales. And it ended the ban on interstate sales by mail, paving the way for robust online purchasing today.

Ammunition sales also are exempt from the federal background checks required of gun buyers and a mandate for retailers to report large purchases to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. And while it is unlawful to sell bullets to anyone under 18, there’s no federal requirement that a buyer present proof of age. That means that in all but a handful of states, lottery tickets are harder to purchase than bullets.

Nikolas Cruz, whose erratic behavior and threats to shoot up a school landed him on an FBI watch list before his attack in Parkland, never faced a background check when buying ammunition. Stephen Paddock amassed an arsenal of thousands of high-powered bullets before the Las Vegas mass shooting without law enforcement ever being notified. He fired more than 1,100 rounds.

One of the most startling aspects of the US government’s financial stake in the commercial ammunition market is how little it has been publicly discussed.

In July 2022, a few weeks after massacres in Buffalo, Uvalde and Highland Park, Illinois, the House Oversight and Reform Committee held a hearing where chairwoman Carolyn Maloney chastised gun industry executives for “profiting off the blood of innocent Americans.” But there’s no indication in the Federal Register or Congressional Record that any congressional hearing has attempted to tally the crime victims killed by Lake City bullets or the government’s revenue from the ammunition sales.

During the Obama Administration, the ATF proposed banning commercial sales of some 5.56mm bullets that are designed for AR-15 rifles but also compatible with semiautomatic pistols. The bullets, known as M855s, are one of the most popular commercial rounds produced at Lake City.

With the help of the NRA and other firearms organizations, gun owners flooded the ATF with more than 80,000 public comments. A letter of opposition signed by 238 members of Congress warned the ATF that it would be “preposterous” to restrict ammunition primarily intended for sporting purposes. “Millions upon millions of these bullets have been sold and the ATF has not alleged, much less offered evidence, that a single one has been fired from a handgun at a police officer, ” the letter said.

The administration dropped the proposal. Some Democrats in Congress criticized the ATF for “sloppy handling” but did not press the issue.

Last summer, the NSSF, the biggest gun industry lobbyist, again sounded the alarm. On social media sites and in the gun-friendly publications, Keane and his staff reported that the Biden administration had told Winchester that it might prohibit the commercial sale of Lake City ammunition for AR-15 type rifles and other high-powered guns.

This time, 50 members of Congress — including Representative Vicky Hartzler and Representative Sam Graves, the Missouri Republicans whose districts are home to many Lake City employees — signed a letter opposing any restrictions. They warned it would jeopardize military readiness, eliminate 500 jobs at the plant, infringe on gun owners’ Second Amendment rights and “result in increased costs for taxpayers at a time when inflation has hit every part of the economy, including the cost and availability of ammunition.”

The Biden administration never publicly acknowledged that it had been considering a ban, but soon responded with a tweet: “The administration is not going to restrict production/sales of excess ammunition currently available for sale to the public at Lake City Army Ammunition Plant.”

Revelations about the Pentagon making money from the civilian market for high-powered bullets have led some members of Congress to call for an investigation. Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, recently introduced a bill that would require licenses for ammunition sellers, background checks for buyers and size limits on civilian bullet purchases. “The government shouldn’t in any way be providing ways to increase the profit margins of these companies,” he said. Garcia supports a ban on Lake City commercial sales, but he added: “Whether that’s something this Congress will support is less certain.”

The fallout from the sale of Lake City products to civilians has spread beyond US borders.

On a November morning in 2019, three SUVs drove through the northern Mexican desert carrying members of the Langford, Miller and LeBaron families from their homes in the village of La Mora. There were 14 passengers in all — some on their way to a wedding, others heading to visit relatives in Arizona. An hour south of the border, their journeys ended in bursts of gunfire, when heavily armed members of the La Linea cartel stopped the vehicles and began shooting. The gunmen were involved in a turf war with a rival cartel, and had been ordered to attack anyone who passed by the dirt road where they’d been stationed.

Firing semiautomatic rifles, they killed all three women in the SUVs and six of their children, including 8-month-old twins. Five other children were wounded. Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office has not responded to repeated requests for a breakdown of US ammunition brands found at crime scenes throughout the country. But a ballistics report on the Mormon families’ slayings obtained by Bloomberg indicates that spent rounds made at Lake City were among the various shell casings recovered by investigators.

Mexican law enforcement experts estimate that more than 75% of the bullets used in crimes south of the border come from the US. American court records contain an array of criminal cases in which arms smugglers were arrested trafficking Lake City ammunition to cartels in the Mexican states of Jalisco, Sinaloa and Chihuahua. Last May, a former US Marine in California pleaded guilty to attempting to smuggle semiautomatic rifles and almost 65,000 rounds of high-powered bullets to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of Mexico’s deadliest. More than a quarter of those bullets had been made at Lake City, including more than 10,000 rounds of armor-piercing, incendiary .50 BMG, according to court documents.

The Pentagon has also sold hundreds of thousands of rounds of high-powered Lake City bullets to the Mexican military, which has periodically seen its weapons and bullets diverted to crime gangs. The ATF declined Bloomberg’s request for information on the origins of ammunition recovered at crime scenes in the US and other countries, despite its robust tracing system. A lawsuit to obtain that data is ongoing.

In the Caribbean, where murder rates have soared in recent years, US-made weapons comprise more than 80% of crime guns on some islands, according to a study released in April by the Small Arms Survey. It found that in the northern Caribbean region — the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, and Bermuda — Lake City ammunition was one of the 10 most common brands used in shootings where authorities traced the bullets’ origin.

In May, a national customs officer in Anguilla was shot with bullets sold legally on the US commercial market. The slaying of officer Garmon Greenaway, 35, rattled the normally peaceful island, prompting the acting prime minister and Parliament to launch new initiatives to take illegal guns off the street. Most of the 23 shell casings found where Greenaway was gunned down had been made at Lake City, according to law enforcement officials.

“Crimes of this kind occur in other countries,” Cora Richardson Hodge, leader of the opposition in Anguilla’s parliament, told members. “But let us not think that they would only happen offshore, figuring that Anguilla will not be impacted.”

Rising from the fields surrounding Independence, Lake City is such a maze of industry and activity that it resembles a bustling company town. More than 60 miles of road weave around the plant’s 400 buildings, which include a water treatment facility, an emergency services center and an automated warehouse the size of 10 football fields.

The plant, built by Remington Arms and opened in 1941, was one of 12 ammunition factories quickly brought on line during World War II. Missouri’s then-Senator Harry Truman pushed to locate it in Independence, where he was raised.

Lake City’s role as a major player in the civilian ammunition market grew out of the “peace dividend” federal officials promised taxpayers at the end of the Cold War by trimming defense spending. After Congress passed the ARMS Act of 1992, which urged the military to close, consolidate and privatize its excess facilities, the Pentagon began converting its government-owned, contractor-operated ammunition plants to allow civilian sales. Today, Lake City is the Defense Department’s last remaining small arms ammunition plant.

Remington ran Lake City until 1985 and since then Winchester and Orbital ATK have alternated as the plant’s operator. The factory’s commercial sales had begun by 2011 and have delivered uneven financial results for the contractors that have run the plant, according to court records and SEC filings.

When the Lake City contract came up for renewal in 2012, Orbital ATK won by submitting a lowball bid that turned into a disaster. After making rosy predictions that cost-cutting measures would make the plant profitable, the company acknowledged in 2016 that it was running a deficit at Lake City and expected to lose $400 million during the 10-year contract. Shareholders sued Orbital ATK’s then-parent company, Alliant, for making false and misleading statements about Lake City’s prospects in its public filings, and the company ultimately settled the case for $108 million.

Winchester, which had initially run Lake City from 1985 to 2000, also saw some lean times. At the end of that stint, the assault weapons ban was still in effect and commercial sales hadn’t yet been allowed. Winchester reported that its pretax profit on the final year of its Lake City contract was just $5 million.

In 2020, Winchester took over the plant again and reaped a windfall. By then, the AR-15 had become the most popular rifle in America, and tens of millions of assault-style weapons had been purchased by US civilians, according to the ATF — vastly expanding the market for Lake City’s high-powered rounds. A spike in gun sales during the Covid pandemic exacerbated a nationwide ammunition shortage, sending prices soaring.

In 2021, the factory’s gun and ammunition sales had more than doubled their 2019 levels, from $665 million to $1.5 billion, according to company filings that reported commercial bullet sales had risen by hundreds of millions of dollars. Winchester’s overall income grew 10-fold, from $40 million in 2019 to $412 million in 2021.

In a recent earnings call, Brett Flaugher, president of Olin’s Winchester division, cited “nearly 15 million new participants entering the recreational shooting sports over the past few years” as a reason to believe demand for Winchester’s ammunition will stay high.

With a flurry of construction underway, the Army Corps of Engineers is conducting more than a dozen improvement projects at the plant. Lake City is expected to receive billions of dollars of public funding for upgrades over the next decade, according to Andrew Bowlen, the Army Corp’s Kansas City District project manager at the site. A new assembly line will make ammunition for the Defense Department’s latest squad weapon, which will replace the M4 machine gun.

Rory Rowland, mayor of Independence, said the plant is such a deeply ingrained part of the community’s culture that residents feel protective toward it. Gun ownership is such a treasured right in Missouri — there’s a state park with a recreational firing range located just outside the plant’s fence — that any move to restrict weapons or ammunition would be opposed as a matter of principle.

“People here really believe in the right to firearms,” he said.

In the coming months, Lake City will break ground for the production facility that will make the Pentagon’s new 6.8 mm rounds, which were designed to pierce body armor at a distance of 1,000 yards. They are scheduled to begin rolling off the assembly line by 2027 — with a commercial version available to civilians.

Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates gun-safety measures, is backed by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

With assistance from: Christopher Cannon and Max de Haldevang

Editors: Flynn McRoberts, John Voskuhl and Jason Grotto