Bart De Wever opened his luggage back in Brussels and found a loaded revolver in it.
Belgium's prime minister was not being smuggled anything. The gun was a parting gift, handed to every leader at the Ankara NATO summit by their host. Erdoğan gave each of them a Turkish revolver, engraved on the barrel with the recipient's name, boxed in wood with the Türkiye flag and the NATO logo and live rounds to show it was the real thing. Reuters, reporting the gift, put the intent plainly: Erdoğan wanted to show off Turkish arms.
The gun was a Gümüşay .357 Magnum, a six-shooter the state maker MKE built in the 1990s and billed as the first revolver Türkiye ever produced. A collector's piece, really, since the country's gunmakers long ago moved on to semi-automatics. The placard in the box said as much, in Turkish and English.
Europe then spent two days deciding what to do with the hardware. De Wever gave his to the airport police for a safe. Poland's revolver waited on customs clearance at Warsaw, to be kept, an aide said, "respected as a gift." Keir Starmer's arrived with a cleaning kit and 500 rounds and got left with the embassy. The Netherlands planned to deactivate theirs, Sweden waited on import papers, and Italy's Giorgia Meloni parked hers at the Palazzo Chigi with the other state gifts. Von der Leyen said she would give hers to a military museum. Canada's Mark Carney, who had handed over maple syrup in return, joked that Canadians prefer to keep guns away from him.
Europe told this as two days of paperwork and awkwardness. Erdoğan was telling a different story, a product demonstration, and the product is doing well.
The distance in that story is easy to miss. Fifty years ago Türkiye could not reliably arm itself. In February 1975, in anger over the 1974 Cyprus Peace Operation, the US Congress cut off military aid and imposed an arms embargo on Türkiye, a NATO ally that leaned on American weapons for much of its military. The embargo held until October 1978, and it taught Ankara a lesson it never unlearned: a country that buys its guns can have them taken away.
What followed was a long, deliberate push to make at home what it used to import. State factories first, then private firms. The pistols carried today by Turkish police officers and soldiers are Turkish, mostly Sarsılmaz, the country's oldest gunmaker and now the main supplier of service sidearms to the police and the armed forces, and Canik. The same firms that arm Türkiye now sell abroad, including to the country that once cut it off.
Türkiye was the world's third-largest exporter of small arms between 2019 and 2024, behind only the United States and Italy, with sales of roughly $3 billion over the period, according to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey. Turkish pistols and shotguns have pushed into Europe's civilian market on price, undercutting the old Italian and Belgian names that used to own the mid-range shelf.
The bigger prize is American. Turkish handgun imports into the United States passed 538,000 units in 2024, up from about 434,000 the year before. The clearest case is Canik, whose US sales grew around 10 percent in 2023 in a year when the American firearms market as a whole shrank by more than a third. It managed that on the thing American buyers care about most, which is money: an optics-ready 9mm for $350 to $450, at a counter where an entry-level Glock rarely dips below $500 and a SIG P320 runs past $600.
The guns review well too, which is what turns a cheap import into a repeat sale. American Rifleman and Pew Pew Tactical have praised Canik's micro-compacts for soft recoil and shootability, and Recoil's editor put the whole category next to the Europeans on quality. Canik, owned by Samsun Yurt Savunma, turns out as many as 460,000 pistols a year, which puts it among the highest-volume handgun makers anywhere.
None of that is an accident of the gift table. Türkiye now treats its defense industry as foreign policy, the export catalog and the diplomacy pulling in the same direction, and one of its makers, Canik, had a stand at the summit itself. The revolver in the wooden box was a period piece. The industry it stood in for is very much present tense.
The leaders will file their paperwork and their revolvers will end up in museums and safes and, in a few cases, display cabinets in presidential palaces. The Gümüşay was never going to be fired. It was going to be seen, and it was.