How the US drives gun exports and fuels violence around the world
No company has benefited more from the federal government’s push to boost overseas sales than Sig Sauer Inc.
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.
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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.
Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement
