Attendees look at handguns during the 2018 Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show, held by the National Shooting Sports Foundation in Las Vegas. Photographer: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

How Hundreds of US Government Employees Became Gun Industry Sales Reps

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

October 19, 2023, 6:30 AM EDT

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.

A shooter checks a target during a tournament in Trujillo, Peru. Photographer: Angela Ponce for Bloomberg Businessweek

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.

America, Global Gun Pusher by Bloomberg Investigations. Read the series

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.

Thomas Saldias during a pigeon hunting trip in Trujillo, Peru. Photographer: Angela Ponce for Bloomberg Businessweek

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.

Thomas Saldias and hunters during a pigeon hunting trip in Trujillo, Peru. Photographer: Angela Ponce for Bloomberg Businessweek

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.

Brazilian Armed Forces soldiers view guns at the Colt booth during the Latin American Aerospace & Defense conference and exhibition in Rio de Janeiro in April 2023. Photographer: Maria Magdalena Arrellaga/Bloomberg

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.

Former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration Kevin Wolf. Photographer: Susan Walsh/AP Photo

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.

The NSSF spends more on pro-gun lobbying than any other organization, including the NRA. NSSF successfully lobbied to move oversight of firearm exports for the civilian market from the State Department to the Commerce Department in 2020, making it easier for gunmakers to sell their wares abroad.

As part of their effort to promote gun sales, Commerce officials recruit foreign buyers and drive attendance at the SHOT Show, which generates 75% of the NSSF’s revenue.

As a Commerce official during the Obama administration, Kevin Wolf helped write the new rule but was unable to push it through. Later, as a partner with law firm Akin Gump, he served as a strategic adviser to the NSSF.

As a candidate, Donald Trump was the keynote speaker at the 2016 SHOT Show. As president, he nominated Richard Ashooh as an Assistant Secretary of Commerce. Ashooh, a former Congressional candidate backed by Sig Sauer executives, guided the rule change through in 2020. Sig hired Akin Gump to lobby for its international sales and military contracts.

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.”

Rev. Edivaldo Ferreira waits to participate in a shooting competition at the Top Gun range in Brazil. Photograph: Sansone Management

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.

Shooting instructor Edilaine Mansueto at the Top Gun Shooting Range in Florianópolis, Brazil. Photograph: Sansone Management

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.

How Hundreds of US Government Employees Became Gun Industry Sales Reps

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

Latin American Surge

Bolsonaro Boon

Steady Growth

Republican Dominance

NSSF’s Big Show

NSSF Overtakes NRA