The United States is the indisputable mass shooting capital of the world. But in the wake of the recent horrifying incidents in Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa and over 230 other communities in 2022, it is worth recalling that the U.S. not only has the highest rate of gun deaths and gun possession among wealthy countries. It is also the world’s preeminent arms merchant. In fact, the U.S. is responsible for more than 40 percent of all reported arms exports globally over the past five years.
About half of U.S. sales between 2017 and 2021 were directed to clients in the Middle East, with the rest scattered across more than 100 countries, including many with a record of serious human rights violations. The most valuable exports include fighter jets and guided missiles, but it is the millions of small arms, light weapons and ammunition that exact the higher human toll. Man-portable air-defense systems, machine guns, semi-automatic rifles, handguns and small arms ammunition make up an estimated $228 billion of the more than $1.3 trillion in U.S. arms export authorizations issued since 2009.
During his 2020 election campaign, President Joe Biden promised to instill a more restrained and human rights-oriented approach to arms exports, but reforms have been sluggish. Sales persist to countries like Saudi Arabia and the Philippines, where human rights are under threat, and U.S. arms continue to flow to places where homicide and police violence are rampant.
The U.S. has a long history of exporting firearms and ammunition to support its security partners. Yet few citizens are fully aware of the sheer scale of this trade and the central role the U.S. government plays in brokering these deals. It works mainly through two federal mechanisms: Foreign Military Sales, in which the Defense Department facilitates arms deals with foreign governments, and the recently created Direct Commercial Sales, in which other U.S. agencies issue export licenses to industry vendors so they can sell directly to foreign customers.
As a result of these programs, U.S. arms sales have quickened in recent years. One example of this is the Merida Initiative, a U.S.-Mexico counternarcotics program launched in 2008, which quadrupled exports of U.S. military firearms, parts and ammunition to Mexico from less than $10 million annually to roughly $40 million per year. This expansion has been criticized for lacking the oversight needed to help ensure that weaponry was not being diverted to Mexican security forces involved in human rights violations or criminal activity. Over the past 10 years, lethal violence has also exploded in Mexico, and the proportion of homicides involving firearms soared.
Mexico’s gun violence epidemic is complicated by a steady flow of illegal firearms coming across the border from the United States. While legal firearm purchases in Mexico can only be made in a single gun store located on a Mexico City army base, an average of 212,000 firearms are trafficked illegally into Mexico each year as a result of straw-man purchases in the more than 52,000 federally licensed dealers in the U.S. It is for this reason that, after determining that more than 70 percent of the firearms recovered in crime scenes in Mexico could be traced back to the U.S., the Mexican government filed a lawsuit against major U.S. gun manufacturers and distributors in 2021 seeking punitive damages of at least $10 billion.
The U.S. has a long history of exporting firearms and ammunition to support its security partners. Yet few citizens are fully aware of the sheer scale of this trade and the U.S. government’s role in brokering these deals.
Arms sales from the U.S. got another boost more recently, during the administration of former U.S. President Trump. Domestic gun production fell sharply between 2016 and 2018—the so-called Trump Slump—owing to diminished fears of gun restrictions during a Republican administration. This incentivized U.S. gun manufacturers to scale up sales to foreign markets. They exported a record-breaking 488,000 firearms in 2017 and another 554,000 in 2018, along with tens of millions of rounds of ammunition, including to countries affected by conflict and systemic human rights abuses. That year, the U.S. authorized the transfer of more than 117,000 Sig Sauer pistols to Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and other countries. In 2018, more than 86,000 semi-automatic handguns, mostly Glocks, went to the Philippines. And in 2020, overseas sales of semi-automatic pistols more than doubled, with many going to Brazil and Mexico, countries with some of the highest levels of homicide and police violence in the world.
This increase in firearms exports during the Trump years was not coincidental. Starting in 2018, and urged on by gun manufacturers and the National Rifle Association, the Trump administration began implementing regulatory changes to ease weapons exports and diminish congressional scrutiny over how the weapons were used. This included creating the Direct Commercial Sales program, which significantly decreased government involvement in brokering the deals. The administration also transferred oversight of many types of weapons—including semi-automatic rifles and handguns, sniper rifles, shotguns, non-lethal grenades and other equipment—from the State Department to the Department of Commerce, sending a powerful signal to firearm and ammunition producers to ramp-up production and expand commercial exports. And if that wasn’t a clear enough sign, Trump even “unsigned” the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty, the first legally binding instrument ever negotiated in the United Nations to establish common standards for the international transfer of conventional arms.
Overall foreign sales of military equipment fell abruptly in 2021 after Biden entered office, but the U.S. government continues to export firearms and other weapons to rights-abusing governments and into conflict zones. Meanwhile, after sagging during the Trump era, domestic gun production soared in 2020 and 2021. Motivated by a combination of pandemic-related insecurity and fear of gun control, annual domestic firearms production surged from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2021. Nearly 21 million firearms were sold in 2020—a record—and 19 million more were sold in 2021.
The Biden administration has also been sluggish about updating arms export-related restrictions, struggling to push reforms past his political opponents in Congress. In 2021, for instance, despite the concerted activism of gun-control groups, Republican lawmakers convinced Congress to drop a proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have required congressional notification for arms export licensing. As a result, both the State Department and Congress continue to lack oversight over exports approved by the Defense and Commerce Departments. And end-user certificates, which explain how and by whom exported arms will be used, are still not rigorously enforced, meaning the U.S. is not well-equipped to monitor weapons misuse.
Similarly, another gun-control effort, the Biden administration’s much anticipated policy on Conventional Arms Transfers, or CAT, was expected to be published in 2022, but appears to have been overtaken by geopolitical events—most notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which will likely slow the strengthening of arms-export controls. The $3.7 billion in military aid that the U.S. has already sent to Ukraine since Russia began its assault features high-profile weapons such as Javelin anti-tank missiles, but it also includes 5,000 rifles, 1,000 pistols and 40 million rounds of ammunition.
In the short term, many of these weapons will be used to stave off the Russian invasion. But in the medium term, small arms and light weapons are likely to end up in black markets and in the hands of other militaries and militias that the U.S. had no intention of arming, as happened in Afghanistan in the past and is happening again now. Interpol has already expressed concern about how weapons sent to Kyiv may make their way onto criminal markets across the European Union and beyond.
The Biden administration says it is serious about upgrading U.S. arms export policies. If CAT is published as planned in 2022—a long-shot given competing priorities—it is expected to prioritize human rights provisions over the economic benefits of these exports. Advocates also believe the policy will shift accountability over foreign firearms and munitions sales back to the State Department, and there is also an expectation that Biden will re-ratify the Arms Trade Treaty before his term is up.
If implemented, these revisions would go some distance toward reducing future U.S. sales to rights-abusing regimes and conflict zones. But as of now, that’s still a very big “if.”
Robert Muggah is the co-founder of the SecDev Group, a digital risk consultancy, and the Igarape Institute, a think tank in Latin America. Previously, he was research director of the Small Arms Survey.