Speaker 1: The United States by far has the highest gun ownership
Speaker 1: rate in the world. There are about four hundred million
Speaker 1: firearms in civilian hands, so US gun manufacturers are seeking
Speaker 1: out new customers overseas. One of the companies working hardest
Speaker 1: at this is sig Sour Bloomberg Investigative reporters Michael Riley
Speaker 1: and David Kochineski right that the once struggling gun maker
Speaker 1: has now become the largest US exporter of guns, and
Speaker 1: it found a helpful hand from a place you might
Speaker 1: not expect, the US government, which has smoothed the way
Speaker 1: for international sales.
Speaker 2: They create trade delegations where they take people down to markets.
Speaker 2: They also bring gun buyers from other countries to the
Speaker 2: Shot Show, for example in Las Vegas, which is the
Speaker 2: main show every year. They give them kind of a
Speaker 2: VIP treatment. They match sellers and buyers. They treated just
Speaker 2: as any other US product that they want to sell.
Speaker 1: One of the company's largest deals was with tail.
Speaker 3: Drawing a correlation and causation when dealing with crime is
Speaker 3: always a very complicated area, and the Thai police don't
Speaker 3: keep specific statistics on what happens with welfare guns.
Speaker 4: However, there was a.
Speaker 3: Big surgeon gun crime in Thailand at the time that
Speaker 3: all these weapons are starting to flow into the country.
Speaker 1: We'll also hear from a reporter Papisha Tanaka Sempapod in Bangkok.
Speaker 1: She'll tell us about the aftermath of a mass killing
Speaker 1: in Thailand.
Speaker 5: The scale of understanding that it took for society to
Speaker 5: come to terms with what happened was unlike anything we've seen.
Speaker 1: I'm west Kasova today on the big take the USX
Speaker 1: sports guns and their consequences. Michael, at the center of
Speaker 1: the story you and David wrote with our colleague Eric
Speaker 1: Fan is this very ambitious CEO look into the future?
Speaker 1: Can you set the scene for us on some level?
Speaker 2: This is a story of an amazing business success and transformation.
Speaker 2: Six hours a very old and storied European gun maker
Speaker 2: German and Swiss. It has roots in both countries. It
Speaker 2: was making rifles during the Seven Years War, that's how
Speaker 2: far back it goes. And yet its guns in the
Speaker 2: marketplace were really well made, but expensive, and so they
Speaker 2: didn't have a huge booming business even in the US
Speaker 2: gun market, which is a great market to be in.
Speaker 2: Their presence in the US was pretty small. The US
Speaker 2: unit was basically a marketing arm for these really well
Speaker 2: made artisanal hunting rifles and pistols. At six Hour made
Speaker 2: it gets this new CEO in the United States, a
Speaker 2: man named Ron Cohen, who really is a kind of
Speaker 2: force of nature. He's in Israeli, served in the Israelian military,
Speaker 2: the IDF, and he comes in with a very different vision.
Speaker 2: He wants a company to really grow. He wants the
Speaker 2: company to mana manufacturer in the United States, and he
Speaker 2: wants to focus on what are called black guns, which
Speaker 2: are guns that are used by either the military or
Speaker 2: police forces. And one of the reasons they're doing this
Speaker 2: is six Hour doesn't have the market share that Smith
Speaker 2: and Wesson does or that River does in the US,
Speaker 2: and so they're looking for places to grow.
Speaker 3: So Cohen saw the opportunity when the assault weapons ban expired.
Speaker 3: It had been there for ten years, and in two
Speaker 3: thousand and four when it expired in the US, he recognized,
Speaker 3: like most people in the gun industry, that this was
Speaker 3: going to be a big moment and a lot of
Speaker 3: money to be made. He wanted Sigsaur to be part
Speaker 3: of it. So rather than focusing on the old German rifles,
Speaker 3: he wanted to get into ar type weapons and to
Speaker 3: pistols that were like semi automatics. He saw that that's
Speaker 3: where the future was and he was going to take
Speaker 3: Sigsauer there.
Speaker 1: So, Michael, what did he do to make that happen?
Speaker 2: So he does a couple of really important things. He
Speaker 2: diversifies the supply chain, makes it more global, but he
Speaker 2: basically makes the guns cheaper. He subcontracts manufactured tories like India,
Speaker 2: they make parts through metal injection molding versus this very
Speaker 2: sort of hammer forged gun making that happened in Germany.
Speaker 2: He opens up a big manufacturing plant in New Hampshire.
Speaker 2: He wants to move the center of gravity of the
Speaker 2: company and it's manufacturing from Germany to the United States,
Speaker 2: and he successfully does that, and he begins to sell
Speaker 2: guns both to police forces and the US military and
Speaker 2: then target countries selling guns to the developing world, especially abroad,
Speaker 2: and he begins to focus on international gun sales.
Speaker 1: David moving the company's operations from Germany to the US
Speaker 1: obviously had one advantage because that's where a lot of
Speaker 1: the customers were. But there was another advantage too that
Speaker 1: you write about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was a regulatory difference, you know. Cohen realized
Speaker 3: that in Europe there are far more regulations for exporting guns,
Speaker 3: and he learned it the hard way. In two thousand
Speaker 3: and nine to six Hour signed a deal with the
Speaker 3: Columbia National Police to sell fifty six thousand handguns. The
Speaker 3: only problem is they didn't have the capacity to make
Speaker 3: them in New Hampshire and it was illegal to export
Speaker 3: them from Germany, so SIGSAUR developed a workaround. It shipped
Speaker 3: German made sig pistols to New Hampshire and filed export
Speaker 3: documents stating that the guns were going to be sold
Speaker 3: in the US civilian market, according to court records, but
Speaker 3: once the weapons arrived in the US, the employees allegedly
Speaker 3: relabeled the shipping boxes and sent them on to Columbia.
Speaker 3: Cohen admitted wrongdoing as part of the settlement that led
Speaker 3: to sigpaing the largest export fine in German history twelve
Speaker 3: million euros, and Cohen ended up getting an eighteen month
Speaker 3: suspended prison sentence. But with that kind of trouble, with
Speaker 3: the costs of Germany, with the unions in Germany, they'd
Speaker 3: rather come to someplace more gun friendly, and that was
Speaker 3: the United States.
Speaker 1: So they moved their manufacturing largely to New Hampshire. And
Speaker 1: what happens next.
Speaker 2: It becomes a much more of an American company. He
Speaker 2: expands the manufacturing in New Hampshire. Eventually the main German
Speaker 2: manufacturing plan to shut down. But he really embraces the
Speaker 2: American gun culture and what it is to be an
Speaker 2: American gun manufacturer.
Speaker 1: What does that mean.
Speaker 2: He plays the politics of it. He creates alliances within RA.
Speaker 3: They started doing outreach for like shooting clubs and bringing people,
Speaker 3: making shooting a family event. And you know, in two
Speaker 3: thousand and eight they finally got their first semi automatic
Speaker 3: rifles on the market, and that kind of changed the
Speaker 3: company too, because all of a sudden, their market was
Speaker 3: the people who want to be tactical shooters, you know,
Speaker 3: civilians who want to fire weapons of war.
Speaker 1: So, Michael, you said that they were zeroing in on
Speaker 1: this black gun market, selling to police departments and the military.
Speaker 1: How did that work?
Speaker 4: To begin with?
Speaker 2: It was a good market for Sick to try and
Speaker 2: get into because you can sell to the police and
Speaker 2: people want to buy your guns, not just the United
Speaker 2: States but elsewhere. We've traveled to other countries as part
Speaker 2: of our reporting for the story. One of the things
Speaker 2: we heard over and over again is from police apartments
Speaker 2: and others that the six hour guns are really good.
Speaker 2: They must be because US law enforcement uses them. There
Speaker 2: is a little bit of a rub though. At the
Speaker 2: same time, by changing manufacturing methods and using cheaper manufacturing
Speaker 2: like metal injection molding, you create tolerances in the guns
Speaker 2: that are less precise. So they've been sued multiple times
Speaker 2: in what are essentially product liability suits, and the plaintiffs
Speaker 2: or people including police officers, who have been wounded or
Speaker 2: maimed because the guns misfired, or at least that's the claim.
Speaker 3: One early and very loud example was in New Jersey.
Speaker 3: The New Jersey State Police bought three thousand sig guns
Speaker 3: in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 4: They had so much problem with them malfunctioning.
Speaker 3: They said they were almost unusable, and by twenty sixteen
Speaker 3: they had gotten rid of them and switched to a
Speaker 3: different weapon altogether and filed a lawsuit.
Speaker 2: The main pistol that they're selling to law enforcement and
Speaker 2: that they sell a lot abroad, is called the P
Speaker 2: three twenty. It's a nine millimeter semi automatic pistol. There's
Speaker 2: a verse of it that they now sell to the Army.
Speaker 2: It's the Army's main side arm and one of the
Speaker 2: things that's novel about it is it's a modular pistol,
Speaker 2: which means you can take the grip and change it,
Speaker 2: and so it can be used by shooters who are
Speaker 2: women or smaller or bigger. That's something that the Army
Speaker 2: really wanted to do. They helped develop the pistol for
Speaker 2: that specific purpose, but it became something that they can
Speaker 2: market to law enforcement and to countries around the world
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 1: So did they manage to turn things around and start
Speaker 1: making more reliable fire arms.
Speaker 2: The lawsuits have continued, and some of the incidents that
Speaker 2: are in the lawsuits are relatively recent ones. So SIG
Speaker 2: will say that they re engineered key aspects of the
Speaker 2: pistol so that they have fixed many of the problems,
Speaker 2: but people who are filing the lawsuits say that the
Speaker 2: either the incidents continue to occur, that the problem has
Speaker 2: not in fact been fixed. Some of these problems with
Speaker 2: their guns have prevented them from being incredibly successful as
Speaker 2: gun manufacturers, sellers, and marketers. One example of that is
Speaker 2: they recently won in twenty the contract for the new
Speaker 2: US Army assault rifle, the US Army hasn't updated it's
Speaker 2: assault rifle in decades, and that contract is going to
Speaker 2: be worth four point five billion dollars over many years.
Speaker 2: It's an incredibly lucrative contract and it is really cemented
Speaker 2: sig as a major manufacture of guns in the United States, David.
Speaker 1: At the same time that Sigsaur was looking to the
Speaker 1: US market, the CEO Cohen also saw the foreign export
Speaker 1: market as a big part of the company's future.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: In twenty ten, Ron Cohen said that he thought the
Speaker 3: developing world was where SIGs Hour's future lie. So he
Speaker 3: tried to beef up his international sales staff and they
Speaker 3: started looking around the globe for different places in Latin America,
Speaker 3: in Asia.
Speaker 1: So, even though they had moved manufacturing from Germany to
Speaker 1: the US in part because it was easier to export
Speaker 1: weapons from the US, they still had some obstacle you write,
Speaker 1: with the US government that they needed to solve.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, gun sales in the US are overseen
Speaker 3: by the government. They're regulated, and the thought is, we
Speaker 3: want to help allow US manufacturers to sell places, but
Speaker 3: when to make sure they don't go the countries where
Speaker 3: they could fall in the hands of terrorists or in
Speaker 3: autocratic governments that will abuse the people or into the
Speaker 3: hands of cartels. So there's a screening process, a licensing
Speaker 3: process that was in the State Department.
Speaker 2: So the gun industry for some time has been pushing
Speaker 2: an effort to switch the regulatory oversight of export licenses
Speaker 2: from the State Department, which typically focuses on things like
Speaker 2: human rights and the possibility of instability where some of
Speaker 2: these guns would go, and move it to the Commerce Department,
Speaker 2: which they saw is a much more business friendly, sales
Speaker 2: friendly kind of environment to do this kind of regulation.
Speaker 2: This proposal first comes up during the Obama administration. They
Speaker 2: had this world change written, but it hadn't been published yet.
Speaker 2: They were preparing to publish and then the school masacre
Speaker 2: in new Town, Connectin happens. Rule change hasn't happened yet,
Speaker 2: but then Donald Trump is elected presidents in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: He has a much more friendly approach to the gun
Speaker 2: industry and he sees this as an opportunity to say, look,
Speaker 2: I'm going to do something for the gun industry. He
Speaker 2: seeses that officials within the Commerce and the State Department
Speaker 2: quickly move to get this rule change to happen. It
Speaker 2: takes a couple of years, the necessarily public commented period,
Speaker 2: but it's clearly on the road to occurring soon after
Speaker 2: Donald Trump gets in and by twenty twenty the rule
Speaker 2: change happens.
Speaker 1: And David you write that six Hour worked very hard
Speaker 1: to court Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: When Trump even the month before he announced his campaign,
Speaker 3: he visited six Hour headquarters in the Hampshire. He got
Speaker 3: a private tour of the factory, and you know, Hampshire
Speaker 3: obviously the first primary state, so it's got a lot
Speaker 3: of political significance. His sons were seen at the SIGs
Speaker 3: Hour booth at the Shots Show, and they gave one
Speaker 3: hundred thousand dollars to a pack that was dedicated to
Speaker 3: getting Trump elected. So they knew who was the gun
Speaker 3: friendly candidate and they were not shy about getting in
Speaker 3: his favor.
Speaker 2: The new rule moved oversight over export licenses to the
Speaker 2: Commerce Department. The Commerce Department made an argument during public
Speaker 2: comments and elsewhere that their regime was as thorough as
Speaker 2: the state departments, but a lot of people predicted that
Speaker 2: international gun sales would go up once oversight was moved
Speaker 2: to the Commerce Department, and in fact that did happen.
Speaker 2: As a result, the gun industry basically got the rule
Speaker 2: change that it wanted in. Companies like six hour have
Speaker 2: since benefited from it by increasing gun sales.
Speaker 1: And David how is the switch from the state departments
Speaker 1: oversight of US gun exports to the Commerce Department changed
Speaker 1: the way the business works.
Speaker 3: The gun industry is selling a lot more guns overseas.
Speaker 3: If you talk to gun brokers, not just at Sigmud, elsewhere,
Speaker 3: they'll say that things happen faster. They'll complain about some
Speaker 3: hold ups here and holdups there. But the National Shooting
Speaker 3: Sports Foundation, which is the industry trade group, had estimated
Speaker 3: beforehand that that change would increase by about twenty percent,
Speaker 3: and it turns out is delivering far more than that amount.
Speaker 1: And what exactly does the Commerce Department do? Aside from
Speaker 1: just approving overseas gun sales.
Speaker 2: Commerce also does a lot more than just oversee the
Speaker 2: licensing process. A different part of the Commerce Department is
Speaker 2: in charge of selling US products abroad, and so they
Speaker 2: create trade delegations where they take people down to markets.
Speaker 2: They also bring gun buyers from other countries to the
Speaker 2: Shot Show, for example in Las Vegas, which is the
Speaker 2: main show every year. They give them kind of a
Speaker 2: VIP treatment. They match sellers and buyers. They treated just
Speaker 2: as any other US product that they want to sell.
Speaker 1: After the break, Sigsaur gets the US governments go ahead
Speaker 1: to sell guns to Thailand. We've heard how in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: gun companies got what they'd hoped for. The federal government
Speaker 1: moved oversight of gun ex it's from the State Department
Speaker 1: to the business friendlier Commerce Department. But even before that happened,
Speaker 1: the Trump administration had already started making it easier for
Speaker 1: gun makers to sell guns overseas. David, you write that
Speaker 1: one of the markets that sig Sour wanted to sell
Speaker 1: guns to was Thailand.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, Thailand has had its own gun.
Speaker 3: Culture for years that it's more pro gun than a
Speaker 3: lot of places in the developing world.
Speaker 4: There's a huge black market.
Speaker 3: You can buy guns on Facebook because of its location
Speaker 3: and relations with the US government and the US military.
Speaker 3: During the Vietnam War, there's a lot of weapons through there,
Speaker 3: and so sig realized that this was a potentially large market.
Speaker 1: Now, Thailand actually has fairly strict gun laws for individuals, right.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 2: It's actually hard for ordinary tie to buy a gun,
Speaker 2: you have to fill out a lot of paperwork. The
Speaker 2: process can take over a year. One of the things
Speaker 2: you have to do is get a boss or some
Speaker 2: other authority. You're to testify that you in fact can
Speaker 2: get a gun. It's relatively onerous, and the guns are
Speaker 2: expensive because there's a forty percent tax on them. For
Speaker 2: all sorts of other reasons about the market, it's really
Speaker 2: expensive to buy a gun. So typically not many ordinary
Speaker 2: ties have access to guns.
Speaker 1: But there is this other method that makes it a
Speaker 1: whole lot easier.
Speaker 2: So six hour spots a kind of a loophole in
Speaker 2: all of that, and that is something that you need
Speaker 2: to TIELND called the Welfare Gun Program. Essentially, what program
Speaker 2: is set up to do is allow police officers and
Speaker 2: government officials to buy personal guns cheaply. The government negotiates
Speaker 2: the price with manufacturers. They could get them at as
Speaker 2: little as a third of the costs of buying one
Speaker 2: in a gun shop. And it solves a problem for
Speaker 2: the government because they don't have to provide the guns
Speaker 2: to police themselves. So these officers sign up for the program,
Speaker 2: they buy a gun. It's their personal gun, but they
Speaker 2: use it on the job.
Speaker 1: And SIGs hour won a big contract under this well
Speaker 1: fair gun program to sell firearms to the Thai police.
Speaker 2: One of the stunning things about six Hours marketing or
Speaker 2: relationships in Thailand was they took a program that was
Speaker 2: relatively small historically few thousand and tens of thousands of guns,
Speaker 2: and then twenty fifteen they signed a really really big
Speaker 2: contract with the Royal type Police. It was for one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty thousand pistols. It was one of the
Speaker 2: biggest contracts for six Hours. It was certainly the biggest
Speaker 2: contract for the gun and welfare program in Thailand, and
Speaker 2: it was worth about one hundred million dollars. The guns
Speaker 2: have a hold up because the US government doesn't issue
Speaker 2: a export license, but once Trump comes in, they start
Speaker 2: moving relatively quickly, and by December twenty seventeen, all these
Speaker 2: guns are flowing into the country.
Speaker 3: So this certainly offers the police away to kind of
Speaker 3: offload the costs.
Speaker 4: It also has a lot of problems.
Speaker 3: Because whale all are intended to go to police officers,
Speaker 3: they don't all stay there.
Speaker 2: One of the problems is that Thailand is a country
Speaker 2: with a lot of corruption, and some of that corruption
Speaker 2: is a social did with the police forces and the
Speaker 2: military of the security forces. So some of these guns
Speaker 2: make their way from where they're supposed to go, which
Speaker 2: is the police forces and officials in the military, and
Speaker 2: they end up being resold on the black market. They
Speaker 2: end up arming the bad guys rather than good guys.
Speaker 2: There are lots of ways in which this happened. In
Speaker 2: one case in particular, that was done last year by
Speaker 2: the Thai equivalent of the FBI, they busted a gun
Speaker 2: trafficking ring. The whole model was they were essentially buying
Speaker 2: guns from this welfare gun program which were cheap, and
Speaker 2: then they were reselling them on the black market or
Speaker 2: smuggling over the border to nearby countries. They could do
Speaker 2: that because the Thai government and six Hours essentially created
Speaker 2: a new asset class by importing all of these tens
Speaker 2: of thousands of relative to the market, very cheap guns,
Speaker 2: and so there was a big incentive to move those
Speaker 2: guns to other places to make money.
Speaker 1: Another reason why this was such a big deal, you right,
Speaker 1: is that gun shops in Thailand have very strict limits
Speaker 1: on the number of guns is they're able to sell
Speaker 1: in a year.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 2: One of the things that the normal commercial market keeps
Speaker 2: the number of guns small in Thailand is that each
Speaker 2: gun shop, and they are about five hundred of them,
Speaker 2: have limits on the number of guns they can import
Speaker 2: it and.
Speaker 4: Sell each year.
Speaker 2: It's thirty pistols and fifty rifles for a year, which
Speaker 2: is probably about what a busy Cabelas would sell in
Speaker 2: a week.
Speaker 1: That works out to about fifteen thousand pistols a year.
Speaker 2: This single warfare gun contract that six Hours struck in
Speaker 2: twenty fifteen was ten times that.
Speaker 1: The guns were supposed to go to the police, but
Speaker 1: not all of them stayed with the police, and that
Speaker 1: started causing some pretty big problems.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So one of the things that's gone on in
Speaker 2: Thailand over the last few years has been an increase
Speaker 2: in gun violence. So over this period where these guns
Speaker 2: were flowing into the country and they are supposed to
Speaker 2: go to the police, there's also an increase in gun
Speaker 2: violence just generally. And some of those guns, some of
Speaker 2: those same models, the P three twenty and the P
Speaker 2: three sixty five that come in through the gun welfare program,
Speaker 2: end up in the hands of bad guys or in
Speaker 2: the hands of people were committeing crimes. Sometimes horrendous ones.
Speaker 2: So in twenty twenty one, one of the police officers
Speaker 2: that got one of these guns is a man named
Speaker 2: Panya conrab And. He was a police officer in a
Speaker 2: rural village of sugar cane and rice fields in northeast Thailand.
Speaker 2: He also had, at least according to his colleagues, a
Speaker 2: drug problem. He got fired from the police and a
Speaker 2: few months after that firing, he took that pistol and
Speaker 2: a very large sugarcane machete knife. He walked into a school.
Speaker 2: He killed twenty three children. In all that day, Panya
Speaker 2: killed thirty six people, some of them with the knife,
Speaker 2: some of them with this P three sixty five six
Speaker 2: hour semi automatic pistol, and then he killed himself.
Speaker 1: And this was the worst mass killing in Thai history.
Speaker 2: That's right, and one of the worst in the world.
Speaker 1: And that, of course drew a lot of attention. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't the only one.
Speaker 2: No, And there was one in particular that drew a
Speaker 2: lot of national attention. In April, a well known influencer,
Speaker 2: a young woman was killed by her boyfriend using a
Speaker 2: P three twenty that had been bought legally by the
Speaker 2: boyfriend's father. There were examples of drive by shootings of
Speaker 2: drug gangs using these guns. How they get from the
Speaker 2: legal program to the hands of criminals some way through
Speaker 2: the black market, It's not always clear, but it's clear
Speaker 2: that these guns are not all staying where they're supposed
Speaker 2: to stay.
Speaker 3: Drawing a correlation and causation when dealing with crime is
Speaker 3: always a very complicated area, and the Thai police don't
Speaker 3: keep specific statistics on what happens with welfare guns. However,
Speaker 3: there was a big surgeon gun crime in Thailand at
Speaker 3: the time that all these weapons are starting to flow
Speaker 3: into the country. The number of crimes involving firearms surge
Speaker 3: between twenty sixteen and twenty twenty one. So at the
Speaker 3: same time that SEGA started to increase the flow of guns,
Speaker 3: the crime with guns is going up.
Speaker 1: David, When you asked EGSAUR about their business about the
Speaker 1: gun experts to Thailand, what do they say?
Speaker 4: They did not respond.
Speaker 3: You know, we emailed repeatedly, and I went to SIG
Speaker 3: headquarters in Newington, New Hampshire and asked for an interview.
Speaker 3: When they didn't respond, we gave a very detailed list
Speaker 3: of questions about what we didn't want to ask about
Speaker 3: and there's been no response whatsoever. We reached out to
Speaker 3: Ron Cohen, the CEO, we reached out to Michael Luca,
Speaker 3: who is the owner from L and O Holding, and
Speaker 3: no response from anyone. The company has just decided to
Speaker 3: not respond.
Speaker 1: But we should be clear that not all these crimes
Speaker 1: were committed with Sigsaur guns.
Speaker 2: That's right, and in fact, it's not easy to tell
Speaker 2: in Thailand which guns are used. You know, as this
Speaker 2: surge of gun violence happens, you can tell in some
Speaker 2: specific instances that sig guns are used. But one thing
Speaker 2: that is clear is that during this period where this
Speaker 2: large number of guns are coming to the country from
Speaker 2: six hour at the same time their relatively strict legal
Speaker 2: imports for the gun shops, gun crime is rising and
Speaker 2: there's lots of evidence that not all the guns that
Speaker 2: were supposed to go to the police stayed with the police.
Speaker 1: I wanted to understand more about how that mass killing
Speaker 1: in Northeast Thailand last year impacted the country. So I
Speaker 1: called a reporter Pepisia a ton of Kasimpapat. She's in
Speaker 1: Bloomberg's Bangkok bureau. Papisia people in the US are very
Speaker 1: familiar with mass shootings, which happen all too often, but
Speaker 1: that's not the case in a lot of other countries.
Speaker 1: Can you describe how extraordinary the shooting in October twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two was for Thailand.
Speaker 5: It was very shocking. I think what happened that day
Speaker 5: was that when in the news first emerge, I took
Speaker 5: everybody by surprise just by the severity and extremity of
Speaker 5: what was happening. And Thailand mass shooting is not that
Speaker 5: common to begin with. The last one before this one
Speaker 5: that we heard about was the one in Coat that
Speaker 5: involved a military officer mall that lasted for hours and hours.
Speaker 5: But what was especially shocking about this case was that
Speaker 5: it was happening at a daycare and it involved dozens
Speaker 5: of children, and this was happening in a very very
Speaker 5: remote part of Thailand that's bordering Laos. So by the
Speaker 5: time that the news sort of reached the people in Bangkok,
Speaker 5: it was already almost over. The shooting already happened, and
Speaker 5: people were struggling to kind of understand why and what
Speaker 5: exactly happened. I think it caused a nerve, especially in
Speaker 5: Thai culture, because we as a Buddhist country, killing is
Speaker 5: a very very big deal. To begin with, we have
Speaker 5: five precepts, which is a concept in Buddhism, and one
Speaker 5: of them is that killing is a very very bad sin.
Speaker 5: And this incident is not just killing, it's killing a
Speaker 5: bunch of children. The scale of understanding that it took
Speaker 5: firsts to come to terms with what happened was unlike
Speaker 5: anything we've seen. My generation has a different relationship with
Speaker 5: guns than our parents' generation and their parents before them.
Speaker 5: I think growing up, I have heard about Thai households
Speaker 5: having a gun in their homes as you know, a
Speaker 5: safety thing for self defense. I've never actually heard of
Speaker 5: anyone having to use it, but it's somewhere in the
Speaker 5: house in a closet, you know, in a safe. It's
Speaker 5: something that gives people comfort, but normal people have never
Speaker 5: actually had to go and find it and grab it
Speaker 5: and use it. At the same time, there's a culture
Speaker 5: of gun enthusiasm. There are shooting ranges where people go
Speaker 5: and you know, show their guns, and it's like a hobby,
Speaker 5: share their enthusiasm for guns with other people. When it
Speaker 5: first happened, like within a day or two or a
Speaker 5: few days after words, the Prime Minister Janoshah he came
Speaker 5: out to say that the country needed stricter gun control
Speaker 5: as well as drug control, because the narrative around this
Speaker 5: mass shooting when it first emerged was that the shooter
Speaker 5: might have been on drugs because he was suspended from
Speaker 5: his job and was going to be on trial for
Speaker 5: drug possession. Fresh in people's mind was still the Chorad shooting,
Speaker 5: the mass shooting in the mall, and then it came
Speaker 5: to the forefront of the discussion and the government said
Speaker 5: that it would review the licenses that have already been
Speaker 5: issued for gun ownership and might revoke some of those
Speaker 5: lenses where necessary, like the gun owners would be required
Speaker 5: to go through psychiatric evaluation. They did actually put an
Speaker 5: outline of their plan after the mass shooting happened, but
Speaker 5: the concrete result of that has yet to be widely perceived.
Speaker 1: Michael, and you spoke to some of the victims of
Speaker 1: some of these shootings in Thailand, So.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we spent some time in the villages around where
Speaker 2: the mass rampage last October took place. We talked to
Speaker 2: neighbors of Panya, and we talked to some of the
Speaker 2: abbots and the temples who spent a lot of time
Speaker 2: with the families that were affected. I mean, it's really
Speaker 2: hard to imagine how much of an impact this had.
Speaker 2: Because the communities were small, they're tight knit, everyone knew
Speaker 2: everyone else. One mom in particular, had as we were
Speaker 2: talking to the habbit at the temple, comes up with
Speaker 2: her five year old who had been in school with
Speaker 2: one of the young children who was killed, and she
Speaker 2: immediately freaked out because we were strangers. And the mother
Speaker 2: explained to us that since the killing, she gets very,
Speaker 2: very scared when somebody these es knows around.
Speaker 1: When we come back, what's next for US gun sales
Speaker 1: around the world? So, David, what does six hours business
Speaker 1: look like? Now? We started this conversation saying they wanted
Speaker 1: to increase exports for the future. They've certainly done that.
Speaker 1: How are they looking?
Speaker 4: Six hour is soaring.
Speaker 3: You have to remember when this company was bought in
Speaker 3: two thousand, it was an adlong that they're trying to
Speaker 3: buy these rifle companies and they had to take SIG
Speaker 3: two America for less than a dollar. They're added into
Speaker 3: the business. Now six hour generates more than a billion
Speaker 3: dollars a year in revenue, according to German financial filings.
Speaker 3: They get the contract for the US Army assault weapon
Speaker 3: for four point five billion dollars, and they are a
Speaker 3: huge exporter. They are the largest US exporter by far.
Speaker 3: They have almost fifty percent of the export market. And
Speaker 3: the thought is that once the US Army side arm
Speaker 3: that they're making and the US Army assault weapon they're
Speaker 3: making become integrated into the force, that sales overseas there
Speaker 3: are just going to go gangbusters.
Speaker 2: So it's been a huge international success for six hours.
Speaker 2: But it's not the only one. They sell guns in
Speaker 2: many countries. They sell guns to Mexico, which has a
Speaker 2: big corruption problems, and some US manufacturers have avoided a
Speaker 2: sell guns to Ivory Coast, which until recently was under
Speaker 2: a UN embargo for guns because there's so much smuggling
Speaker 2: that comes from there. They sell guns into the Emirates,
Speaker 2: They sell guns all around the world.
Speaker 3: You know, they are the biggest, so we focus them
Speaker 3: on this story. But other gun makers are doing the
Speaker 3: same and America is the biggest arms exporter in the world,
Speaker 3: and so other companies are following a similar pattern, and
Speaker 3: we're seeing the impact.
Speaker 1: And what about Thailand in the wake of all of
Speaker 1: these shootings, have they done anything.
Speaker 2: Well, especially after the killing in October, there was a
Speaker 2: big examination of the welfare gun program. They suspended for
Speaker 2: a time. We asked one of the police generals who
Speaker 2: was in charge of the commission that examined the welfare
Speaker 2: gun program what was going to happen. They said, do
Speaker 2: you think it'll continue? With some minifications. They'll try and
Speaker 2: crack down a little bit on who's available to get it.
Speaker 2: They may put some provisions in for mental health, but
Speaker 2: it's likely to go on. They haven't done a major
Speaker 2: welfare gun program contract since then, but it's likely that
Speaker 2: once they sort out what the new regulations are, that
Speaker 2: they'll start doing them again.
Speaker 1: Michael, we talked earlier about how the Commerce Department is
Speaker 1: trying to facilitate sales and help the gun manufacturers the
Speaker 1: way the Department does for any other US product, and
Speaker 1: yet the Biden administration has taken a pretty strong stand
Speaker 1: against the gun industry in the wake of US mass shootings.
Speaker 2: That's right. Although the Democrats generally the Biden administration in particular,
Speaker 2: are focused on domestic gun sales, what happens to all
Speaker 2: of those guns that are sold and under what conditions
Speaker 2: are sold. The interesting thing about having looked at gun
Speaker 2: exports for some months during our reporting. One of the
Speaker 2: thing we found is it's just not a huge policy
Speaker 2: priority for just about anybody, in part because there's so
Speaker 2: much to pay it to domestically. But when you do
Speaker 2: shift the lens a little bit and begin to look
Speaker 2: at US gun exports, where they're going and what's happening
Speaker 2: in those countries where they're going, a lot of things
Speaker 2: open up that look as if the US is exporting
Speaker 2: its gun culture to many of these countries, and so
Speaker 2: along with these weapons, they're basically creating markets by exporting
Speaker 2: a culture.
Speaker 3: And you know, candidate Biden on his website said that
Speaker 3: if these regulations were loosened at allowing oversight to switch
Speaker 3: from state to commerce, if those are enacted, he would
Speaker 3: rescind them and he could do it with the stroke
Speaker 3: of a pen. And they have not done anything he's
Speaker 3: been in office. And if you ask people around the administration,
Speaker 3: they will say, well, he did do some things about
Speaker 3: three D printed guns and whatever.
Speaker 4: But the reality is, you know.
Speaker 3: On the campaign they link to very specific things about
Speaker 3: the concerns that this would lead to increase of gun
Speaker 3: sales and places where they're going to hurt civilians and
Speaker 3: they have not acted.
Speaker 1: What does the White House say about this program? And
Speaker 1: where does the Commerce Department say?
Speaker 3: A spokesperson for the Biden Administration's National Security Council responded
Speaker 3: to US and said that the US quote thoroughly reviews
Speaker 3: firearm export applications for national security, human rights, and other
Speaker 3: policy concerns to limit illegal trafficking or diversion of firearms.
Speaker 3: They also went on to say that the transfer of
Speaker 3: responsibility from state to Commerce quote has strengthened enforcement and
Speaker 3: investigative scrutiny over these exports because they use the Commerce
Speaker 3: Department's resources and personnel.
Speaker 1: Michael David, as you continue to cover this story, where
Speaker 1: are you watching for? What is the next thing?
Speaker 2: I mean, one of the things that we're going to
Speaker 2: continue to do is follow these guns into different parts
Speaker 2: of the world. We focused on Thailand in this story,
Speaker 2: but there are other countries where, under very different conditions,
Speaker 2: US guns are pouring into those countries and having a
Speaker 2: similar devastating effect.
Speaker 1: And not just six Hour but other manufacturers.
Speaker 2: Not just six Hour, but all sorts of manufacturers. And
Speaker 2: in fact, one of the trends we're watching is that
Speaker 2: a lot of European manufacturers and manufacturers from other countries
Speaker 2: are opening up plants manufacturing facilities in the US. They
Speaker 2: want to do that because they want to sell the
Speaker 2: US market, but they also want to take advantage of
Speaker 2: the looser export regimes in the US to sell internationally.
Speaker 3: I'm looking to see how this scrutiny to this will
Speaker 3: be taken internationally by other countries. There have been a
Speaker 3: lot of complaints about US illegal guns going in and
Speaker 3: you know the lawsuit that Mexico has filed against the US,
Speaker 3: and there's been a complaint, the big complaints in the
Speaker 3: Caribbean basin nations about US guns being smuggled in and
Speaker 3: leading to an inordinate amount of crimes. According to trace
Speaker 3: data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives,
Speaker 3: about twenty percent of crimes committed with guns in Central
Speaker 3: America these weapons that were brought in legally from the
Speaker 3: United States and Canada, that number is thirty percent. And
Speaker 3: so I think, well, there's been all this focus on
Speaker 3: illegally smuggled guns, and rightly so. The fact that a
Speaker 3: lot of the crimes are being committed with legally exported
Speaker 3: guns that are being helped and enabled by the United
Speaker 3: States government.
Speaker 4: I think that's a discussion that needs to be had.
Speaker 1: David Michael, thanks so much for speaking.
Speaker 4: With me today, Thanks for having us, thanks.
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