TTo restrict the use of U.S.-made civilian weapons in crimes and human rights violations abroad, the Biden administration will require exporters to better vet their customers and restrict sales to 36 countries considered “high risk” for illicit diversion of civilian weapons. semiautomatic fire, according to people briefed on the plan.
The new regulations — the most comprehensive in decades — also cut the duration of export licenses from four years to one and give the State Department greater authority to block sales. The Commerce Department is scheduled to release on Friday the 150-page regulation, which agency officials outlined to advocacy groups and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
The plan resulted from the department’s review of its support for the U.S. weapons industry — a process that began after a Bloomberg News investigation last year linked record civilian gun exports to higher rates of gun crime in countries including Guatemala, Brazil and Canada. A Commerce Department spokesperson declined to comment on the new regulations when contacted Thursday.
Over the past decade, Republican and Democratic administrations have released U.S.-made guns as a retail product in some of the world’s most violence-prone countries. The investigation documented how legally exported weapons were used in crimes ranging from a massacre at a preschool in Thailand in 2022 to the assassination last August of the main presidential candidate in Ecuador.
In late October, the Biden administration announced a 90-day freeze on many U.S. firearms exports so it could consider revising regulations. The new measure is expected to be made public six months after the freeze.
Gun rights advocates called the policy review an “attack on the American firearms industry” that would cost U.S. manufacturers and exporters hundreds of millions in lost sales per year. His supporters in Congress pressured the administration to end the freeze, promising to nullify any new restrictions on such exports.
“The rule will simply shut down small businesses across America, isolating them from the export market, resulting in the loss of good-paying jobs,” said Larry Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, in an email late on Friday. Thursday. The new regulations “will do nothing to improve national security,” he added.
The move falls short of President Biden’s campaign promise to return oversight of arms exports to the State Department, which regulated foreign arms sales until March 2020. It will now lead an interagency review process that will examine any export requests that involve potential human rights concerns. .
These reviews will include any requests for U.S. arms exports to countries that the State Department has identified as a risk for human rights abuses and arms trafficking. The new rules require Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s department to evaluate applications for commercial export licenses for countries with a presumption of denial, rather than the current presumption of approval.
The list of countries considered high risk includes many where the influx of U.S.-made weapons has been linked to widespread violence, including Vietnam, Jamaica, Indonesia and Pakistan, as well as countries in the Organization of American States, which includes large part of the Central and South America.
But the high-risk list omits several places where U.S. weapons have been linked to violent gangs or human rights violations, such as Mexico, Thailand, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia.
For arms exporters, the new regulations not only restrict the potential market, but require more customer screening and more expenses. Exporters must renew export licenses every year and will be required to submit more complete purchase applications in many countries. They must also collect copies of passports or national identity cards from arms dealers and other clients who are abroad.
The new rules also aim to make it easier for federal regulators to scrutinize exports of the most dangerous weapons by creating separate commercial categories for semiautomatic firearms and the components used to create them. These products were classified into a comprehensive group that included everything from hunting rifles to antique collectibles.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
