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28 June 2022

America Is the World’s Gun Store

Robert Muggah

Western countries’ coordinated arms deliveries to Ukraine, already worth tens of billions of dollars, have cast a fresh spotlight on global military assistance. But while the world’s attention is fixated on fighter jets, battle tanks, and rocket launchers, it is the millions of small arms, light weapons, and ammunition traded and trafficked globally each year that exact a far higher human toll. Of the more than $1.3 trillion in U.S. arms export authorizations issued since 2009, firearms such as machine guns, semi-automatic rifles, handguns, and ammunition make up an estimated $228 billion. These deliveries are disproportionately destabilizing—especially since there is little oversight and many of the weapons end up on the black market and in the wrong hands.

Every year, tens of thousands of people are violently killed and injured by firearms in war zones around the world—far more than by bombs, missiles, and other major weapons. According to a recent study by the United Nations, the poorly regulated flow of firearms disrupt peace agreements, undermine the work of peacekeepers, prolong armed conflicts, and inflict untold pain and suffering on civilians. Outside these war zones, hundreds of thousands more people die as a result of gunfire every year—including in ostensibly peaceful countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for men between the ages of 15 and 34 in each of these countries and many others.

The majority of the weapons and bullets contributing to global mayhem are made in and sold by the United States—which adds another deadly layer to the notorious U.S. inability to regulate firearms and stem gun violence at home. While U.S. President Joe Biden promised to restrain arms sales with a more human rights-oriented approach during the 2020 presidential campaign, reforms since then have been sluggish. U.S. arms keep flowing to places where criminal and police violence are rampant. His administration has continued, for example, to export small arms, ammunition, parts, and components to the security forces of countries such as Saudi Arabia and the Philippines, where human rights are flagrantly violated.

The United States has a long history of exporting firearms and ammunition to its military and police partners near and far. These deals mainly work through two federal mechanisms: military sales to foreign governments directly facilitated by the U.S. Defense Department and commercial sales by gun and ammunition vendors, which require an export license from the U.S. government. In all instances, the U.S. Arms Export Control Act requires risk assessments and end-use monitoring to ensure that transfers are unlikely to produce unwanted outcomes. Through these and other channels, U.S. firearm and ammunition sales have quickened in recent years, including to countries where the risks of unintended impacts are obvious.

Consider the Merida Initiative, a U.S.-Mexican counternarcotics program. Launched in 2008, it has scaled up exports of U.S. weapons to Mexico. It is one of the reasons U.S. exports of firearms reached almost $123 million over the three year-period from 2015 to 2017—a more than 12-fold rise compared to a similar three-year period from 2002 to 2004. This vast expansion in exports was criticized for lacking the oversight needed to ensure that rifles, handguns, and ammunition were not being diverted to those parts of the Mexican security forces that have been involved in human right violations, crime, and corruption. Since taking office in 2018, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has criticized the initiative on the grounds that it prioritizes a militarized approach to fighting crime rather than focusing on job creation and development.

Beyond formal bilateral programs, U.S. guns are fueling Mexico’s epidemic of lethal violence, which has exploded over the past decade as the share of homicides involving firearms soared. Part of the reason is the steady flow of illegal firearms across the U.S.-Mexican border. Whereas Mexico restricts legal firearm sales to a single gun store at an army base in Mexico City, an average of 212,000 firearms are trafficked illegally into Mexico each year, usually involving straw man purchases from among the United States’ innumerable gun shows and more than 52,000 federally licensed gun dealers—which, to the eternal shock of foreign visitors, include mass-market retailers such as Walmart.

After discovering that more than 70 percent of the firearms recovered at Mexican crime scenes could be traced back to the United States, the Mexican government filed a lawsuit against major U.S. gun manufacturers and distributors in 2021. It is seeking punitive damages of at least $10 billion. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress is negotiating a historic $13 billion bipartisan gun bill that could slow the illegal flow of firearms to Mexico. Already approved by the U.S. Senate, the bill will not only fund local violence prevention measures but also tighten restrictions on gun dealers and ramp up penalties for straw man purchases and gun trafficking.

U.S. firearms exports received a sharp boost during the early years of the Trump administration. Domestic gun sales fell sharply between 2016 and 2018—a decline arms industry analysts call the Trump slump and trace to diminished fears of gun restrictions from a Republican administration. (Domestic gun sales skyrocketed to their highest-ever levels during the final year of the Trump administration and the first year of the Biden presidency, attributed to pandemic-related insecurity, widespread social unrest, and the police defunding debate.) The temporary drop in domestic sales incentivized U.S. gun manufacturers to scale up exports to foreign markets. They exported a record-breaking 710,031 firearms in 2017 and another 817,189 in 2018, along with tens of millions of rounds of ammunition—including to countries affected by conflict and systemic human rights abuses. In 2018, for example, 86,000 semi-automatic handguns went to the Philippines. And in 2020, overseas sales of semi-automatic pistols more than doubled, with many going to Brazil and Mexico, countries registering some of the highest levels of homicide and police violence in the world.

The way these increases in firearms exports were engineered seriously set back efforts to control the spread of U.S.-manufactured lethal weapons. 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 deals with foreign customers.

These reforms involved transferring oversight of many types of weapons—including semi-automatic rifles, handguns, sniper rifles, shotguns, nonlethal grenades, and other equipment—from the State Department to the Commerce Department. This sent a powerful signal to gun and ammo makers to ramp up production and expand commercial exports. President Donald Trump even withdrew the United States from the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty, the world’s first legally binding instrument to rein in weapons transfers to serial human rights-violating regimes.

Despite Biden’s campaign promises, his administration has been sluggish about updating arms export-related restrictions. Although foreign sales of military equipment fell abruptly in 2021, when the Biden administration entered office, the U.S. government continues to export firearms and other weapons to rights-abusing governments. One of the reasons is continued Republican opposition. In 2021, for instance, Republican lawmakers convinced Congress to ignore the activism of gun control groups and 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 still lack oversight over exports approved by the Defense and Commerce departments. What’s more, end-user certificates, which explain how and by whom exported arms will be used, are still not rigorously enforced once deals are struck, meaning the United States is not sufficiently well equipped to monitor weapons misuse.

Similarly, another gun control effort, the Biden administration’s much anticipated Conventional Arms Transfers (CAT) policy, was expected to be published in 2022 but seems to have been overtaken by geopolitical events. Most notably, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and strong bipartisan support for supplying arms to Kyiv will likely slow the strengthening of arms export controls. And while the weapons delivered to Ukraine will help stave off the Russian invasion, it’s also likely that in the medium to long term, small arms and light weapons will end up in black markets and in the hands of other militaries and militias that Washington had no intention of arming, as has happened and continues to happen in Afghanistan. Interpol has already expressed concern about how weapons sent to Kyiv may eventually be recycled into criminal markets across the European Union and beyond.

The Biden administration says it is serious about upgrading U.S. arms export policies. That the revised CAT will be published in 2022 is a long shot given competing priorities—but when it finally comes out, 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 urge Congress to ratify the Arms Trade Treaty before his term is up.

If the Biden administration delivers on its arms control agenda—never an easy sell given its political opponents—it will hopefully give special attention to small arms, light weapons, and ammunition, where more restrictions and better monitoring would have a disproportionate effect on lethal violence around the world. If implemented, these revisions would go some distance toward reducing future U.S. transfers to rights-abusing regimes and conflict zones. Geopolitical headwinds and an increasingly rancorous U.S. political environment, however, give few reasons to be optimistic.

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