The US gun market is the biggest in the world by far.
Gun sales across the United States
have reached record highs.
We produce the most guns.
And as the market in the US gets to some point of saturation,
in other words,
they've already sold 400 million guns.
There's been a push by
US gun manufacturers to sell abroad.
The problem is that
the places that want guns
tend to be countries with high-crime rates,
a lot of political instability,
or a lot of violence.
There are now more guns than people in the US.
And even though American gun purchases
haven't slowed down,
manufacturers have set their sights
outside the US to boost sales as well.
You go back almost 20 years,
the assault rifle ban expires in 2004
and that pushes gun manufacturers
to start to develop new lines of guns,
including AR-15 style guns.
At the same time, the gun industry
and individual gun companies
start trying to tap international markets
as a way to grow more sales.
And so the US manufacturers
they've used both,
their own money, their own power.
They've used advocacy groups like the NRA
to help open markets for the US
and to beat back
gun control in other countries.
And they've also used the power
of the US government.
A regulatory change begun under the Obama administration
and completed by the Trump administration in 2020
gave gun manufacturers the greater freedom to export
that they'd been looking for.
They said, look we’re regulating guns
and a lot of what they call dual-use items
the same as you would regulate weapons of war.
And in some cases it made sense.
You shouldn't have to get a license to
sell a screw that might be used in an F-16.
They loosened the restrictions
and instead of it going through the State Department,
it's now handled under the Commerce Department.
The idea is that guns, just like any other US made product,
Commerce sees part of its role is to help sell those things.
They do that with planes, they do that with whiskey,
they do it with all sorts of products.
But when they did this, they also included
very controversial weapons
the AR-15, the 50-caliber guns
that the cartels are using in Mexico
and can shoot through engine blocks.
Those are now treated as commercial items.
So where do these guns end up?
It's probably important to note that most countries in the world
don't want to buy US guns
because most countries in the world
have relatively strict gun laws.
And so you have this mix of
US guns going to places
with a lot of instability
and not the strongest hold on democracy.
Tracking gun shipments is very difficult
because they don't put much data out.
And what they put out
is very complicated.
You need a license to export guns from the US.
In order to get the license,
you have to have approval
of the country where
the weapons are going to go.
Where the guns go once they end up in those countries,
are a total different matter.
In Mexico, there's one gun store
and there's hundreds of thousands of guns
that go to the Mexican police and military.
But a lot of those guns later end up
in the hands of cartels or paramilitary groups.
In Thailand, there's pretty strict gun control on the record.
But the black market is so widespread
that people advertise on Facebook
and Twitter to sell guns illegally.
Over the last few years there have been
all-time highs in US gun exports.
One of the most troubling things
is that there is an increase in violence
where a lot of the exports are increasing.
And you got to be careful,
correlation is not causation,
but in some places like Latin America,
they say that about 20% of the crime guns
recovered were legally exported.
If you talk to people in Guatemala and Honduras,
they say a lot of the migrant crisis
at the US border is being fueled by the fact
that there's just rampant street crimes
and cartels and drug violence
and there's so many guns there.
And the US is sending more guns.
In Mexico, for instance,
they say less than 2% of crime guns
are legally from the US.
But Mexico only submits a very small portion of overall
crime guns to be traced.
But it is clear that significant number
of the crime guns in other countries
are legal exports rather than illegal.
Along with guns, manufacturers are doing their best
to spread the culture around guns as well.
In order to sell more guns internationally,
these gun manufacturers, gun lobby,
they want to export American gun culture as well.
Which is, owning a gun is a right
to as violence increases in places
like Central America and elsewhere,
that the best way to counter that violence
is to arm ordinary people
so that they can defend themselves.
Sig Sauer, for example,
has something called the Sig Academy.
They will fly people over
and let them try a lot of different guns, shoot guns.
At the same time, they're in the US, they travel business class.
It's a nice trip.
They'll also do a lot of sponsorships
for police departments for events
and that creates a sort of a relationship
between the gun manufacturers
and the buyers in these countries.
There are instances where legally exported American guns
can be proven to have been used in
mass killings in foreign countries.
So one of the things started to do is
look at the sales of US guns abroad.
And one of the things that popped up immediately is
that Thailand buys more US guns
than just about any other country.
A lot of those guns have come through
this unique program called the Gun Welfare Program.
Thai police didn't have very many guns
and the guns they did have were old and didn't work very well.
So they negotiated with Sig Sauer and other companies
pretty good prices for the guns.
The police would buy them as personal guns
and then use them when they were on the force.
The problem is that warped the market.
So rather than just buy one of them,
people started to buy two or three of them
and then you have an investment,
you could sell them.
So these guns sort of flooded the country.
We followed one in particular,
which was a P365 that Sig Sauer sold
to a policeman in 2021,
and that policeman was later fired for using drugs.
And ended up using that gun
in the worst mass shooting
in Thailand's history.
36 people were killed,
it was a small, tiny little village.
24 of them were children.
It's not only one of the worst mass shootings in Thai history,
it's one of the worst mass shootings in the world, period.
The prospects for reining in profligate gun exports might be slim,
but increasing restrictions could be surprisingly simple.
The president can do it with the stroke of a pen.
The whole time regulations were going through, it was the president’s decision
to no longer regulate certain weapons
under the US munitions list.
So President Biden could do it tomorrow.
The political wrath he would face
from businesses, from advocacy groups
would probably be ferocious.
Joe Biden, for example,
made a promise in his election campaign
where he said,
if I get elected, I will take this
2020 rule change and I'll just reverse it.
Here we are, in 2023,
he's running for a second term
and that reversal hasn't happened.
So even as the rest of the world
is looking with horror at the situation
with the gun crime and the mass shootings in the US,
the US is loosening restrictions
and exporting more guns than ever around the world.