I have a feeling some readers might find this the most boring thing I have covered. For those interested in this niche topic, I hope it is of value.

One of the weirdest idiosyncrasies of American law is that now in the 2020s, it is easier – far easier in fact – for a private citizen to import a WWII German 98k or WWII Japanese Arisaka into the USA; than it is to bring a WWII American M1 Garand back into America.

(WWII poster showing a M1 Garand rifle.) (original 1942 art by John Falter)

(M1 Garands in a Springfield Can, these being of the South Korean holdings which are now marooned there in the 2020s.) (photo via SWAT magazine)

 

disclaimer

Because society is so litigious, I should state that I am not a lawyer and nothing here is intended as legal advice.

what guns are being discussed below

United States Munitions List (USML) Class Ia items are (in the context of WWII) the M1 Garand, M1917, M1941 Johnson, and M1903 Springfield rifles, and the M1 carbine. These are what is being examined. The M1917 and M1911A1 pistols of WWII are also USML Class Ia, however handguns have additional headaches and for brevity’s sake are not discussed here.

USML Class Ib from WWII would be the M2 carbine (the select-fire version of the M1), the M1918 BAR, and all WWII American submachine guns and machine guns. These are indisputably banned from reimport and are not discussed here.

alphabet soup

It may be helpful to know how WWII surplus American guns went abroad to begin with.

pre-1949 programs: Lend-Lease was while WWII was ongoing. FLC (Foreign Liquidation Commission) sales was a State Department “cash & carry” effort in the first postwar years.

Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP) 1949: This was Congress’s first large statutory military aid program. Section 408(f) stated that gear remained American property; the way the law was interpreted was that it was “loan-to-own” in that WWII weapons, after transfer, would eventually depreciate below scrap value upon which time the ally would pay a symbolic tiny fee. That is generally how it worked out.

(Colombian soldiers with M1 Garands during the 1950s. MDAP and early MAP into Latin America is often called Rio Pact Aid.)

Military Assistance Program (MAP) 1951: MAP was the “flagship” military aid effort administered by the Pentagon. MAP started in 1951 as a successor to MDAP and totally replaced it by 1957. The majority of American WWII firearms which got transferred as postwar aid, did so through MAP. MAP is not an “open shop”, Congress annually approves the amount and type of equipment on a per-nation basis and there are regional and worldwide limits. MAP still exists in 2026.

WWII small arms transferred as MAP aid could be MAP grant (free), or a financed MAP sale (low-interest loans repayable over 10 years by the recipient nation). The terms – especially with grants – now have major implications for efforts to reimport the guns decades later. This is because MAP had “reversionary” or “residual” rights attached, as explained further below. Security Assistance Program (SAP) was the same thing but originating in the State Department, administered jointly with the Pentagon. It had the same setup.

(Uruguayan sailors with M1 Garands during 2015. Uruguay received 8,561 Garands via MAP.)

Excess Defense Articles (EDA) 1961 & 1976: Still ongoing in 2026, EDA is obsolete weapons given away to allies. There are no guarantees to their condition and no promise of future ammunition support. Because EDA was abused during the Vietnam War era, it was relaunched in 1976 with tighter controls. Also in 1976 it replaced MAP Grants, which were eliminated as an option of that program.

Foreign Military Sales (FMS) 1961: Still ongoing in 2026, FMS is the other “flagship” military aid program however it is administered by the State Department. FMS recipients must be on an approved list of nations however unlike MAP, approval is not needed on a per-instance basis unless the items are high-tech or high-value, of which WWII small arms were neither. The way FMS works is that, depending on the recipient nation, Congress approves free “credits” called Section 2763 FMF (foreign military funding). The recipient nation spends these “credits” like a debit card, until they are exhausted upon which time the recipient needs to start spending their own money if they want to keep shopping. Alternatively, Congress may approve a nation for FMS but without FMF, in which case they must 100% spend their own money. FMS items can be modern or old, used or new (obviously for WWII small arms they were all old and used) and can come either from U.S. government ownership or from private American arms dealers.

Direct commercial sales (“DCS”) is an adjective, not a program. This was just a foreign nation contacting an American holder of American-made WWII guns and directly buying them with their own money. The American exporter had to hold a Office of Munitions Control export license, otherwise the government was not involved.

reversionary rights

WWII firearms transferred via MDAP, MAP, and SAP had “reversionary” rights kept by the USA, the most important being “right of first refusal” (Section 506(4) of MAP). Here, when a recipient no longer needed the guns, it must first offer their return to the United States government, only after this being declined could they dispose of them. Today, this is an extremely critical thing and answers why certain nations can not sell their M1 Garands or M1 carbines to American civilians…..technically they are not fully theirs to sell. This is especially true if the MAP transfer was a grant (free) as it is illegal for anybody to profit from grant aid.

MAP reversionary rights could (if allowed by Congress) be “bought out” by the recipient or voluntarily ceded by the USA. Why it was uncommon for small arms is that for the USA, it was a benefit due to a clause called MAP-RDA (redistributable assets). Here, if Nation X no longer needed old M1 Garands provided through MAP but Nation Z did, the State Department could, as long as the rights were in place, immediately move them from X to Z simply by notifying Congress, not needing Congress’s permission first.

On the recipient’s end, the rifles shot equally well with or without the rights in place. Some MAP recipients simply lacked money to buy out the rights.

(France extinguished MAP rights on a national level; few aid recipients were rich enough to do that. Here a French advisor at Quàng Yên, Vietnam trains a South Vietnamese soldier on a M1 Garand which France retransferred.) (photo by Paul Corcuff)

On 30 September 1980 it was announced that going forward, reversionary rights on MAP small arms would no longer be enforced. This did not cede the rights on weapons MAP-transferred before 1980, which remained in place. That covers all WWII rifles: the final M1 Garand rifle MAP transfers were in 1973 (South Vietnam) and the final M1 carbine MAP transfers were in 1976 (Thailand).

EDA transfers are unusual; the American military legally could not reingest these guns as they had previously declared them excess to Congress. As EDA is by definition 100% grant aid, basically the only option for recipients was to use them until disposal (which is its own problem, described later below).

FMS, a State Department program, has its own rules. Originally this was just applied when FMF “credits” had been used, then expanded to any formally-administered FMS sale. Starting in 1976, the interpretation retroactively expanded again to any overseas sale ever done by any Office Of Munitions Control licensed exporter – even if the nation had 100% spent its own money in a direct commercial buy.

This was a profound change, as it retroactively created new restrictions against guns transferred decades earlier, where the recipient had paid cash 100% of their own money to a private American arms dealer, without any conditions in the contract.

(Costa Rica has no standing military but a small uniformed Fuerza Pública, here with M1 Garands.)

As an example Costa Rica bought around a thousand WWII rifles, M1903 Springfields and M1 Garands, from the arms dealer Sam Cummings during 1953 – 1954. This was a private cash transaction, not American military aid. Now two decades later, the US State Department put limitations on their possible resale. As to where the State Department derives authority to do this, one answer might be “Who’s to stop them?”.

the AECA

The Arms Export Control Act (P.L. 94-329 of 1976) remains the biggest hurdle to reimporting WWII American firearms. This 42-page law’s focus was on weapons exports, not private-party reimports, but a key passage is underlined below:

AECA §2778(b)(1) totally banned reimportation of American-made military arms for private resale within the United States. It was all-inclusive: any weapon of any era, from any and all current or past military aid programs, irregardless of whether reversionary rights had been extinguished or whether FMS credits had been applied or not.

This total prohibition should have been the end of the matter, and from 1976 until the 1980s situation below, it basically was. It was illegal for Americans to reimport American WWII guns, end of story.

a most bizarre situation: 1984 – 1988

A law passed in 1984, 27 CFR §478.11 instructed that ATF must not unilaterally disbar civilian importation of guns on the Curio & Relics List (over 50 years old with heightened collectability). The C&R List includes some WWII-era American guns: the M1 Garand, M1903 Springfield, M1 carbine, etc.

At the same time a different law, 1976’s AECA, already demanded that exported American-made USML Class I items must be unilaterally disbarred.

So now there was a strange situation: two laws simultaneously on the books, impossibly ordering opposite outcomes. Neither law overrode the other, both were equally valid. This confusing four year span happened at the time of some of the reimportations described later below including the Blue Sky Garands from South Korea. This was finally resolved by Congress on 22 December 1987 when a small amendment (§2778) was tucked into an unrelated 456-page funding omnibus.

This clarified that if no reversionary rights remained, WWII American military guns on the C&R List were not unilaterally barred. So starting in 1988, for the first time since 1976, there was a possibility again for private reimporters.

End-of-Life restrictions

Section 505(f) of MAP demands that the United States be reimbursed of any proceeds from aid disposal: if the host nation scrapped it, the USA got the scrap value; if they resold the guns, the USA got 100% of that. Starting in 1984 the Defense Department generally ceased collecting on legacy small arms as the cash generated didn’t outweigh the admin costs. However this is no relief to prospective reimporters today: even if the Pentagon isn’t collecting the money, they alone are still legally entitled to it.

For past FMS sales paid for with FMF “credits” wholly or in part, the State Department has similar strictures.

These restrictions effectively maroon abroad all EDA and most FMS sales where any credits had been used. MAP transfers with reversionary rights intact aren’t even the host nation’s to sell to begin with.

This then leaves a narrow window: MDAP or MAP transfers with all rights extinguished, certain FMS sales and old direct commercial sales, very old FLC transfers, and in extremis WWII Lend-Lease.

when “disposed of” becomes a problem

Today disposal of military aid is extremely regulated: it must be permanently demilitarized (like a museum piece) or totally destroyed and a Form DSCA 5105.38 remitted to the American embassy. This wasn’t always the case in decades past, when “disposal” was managed unevenly, sporadically, or not at all. Some nations considered disposal-through-surplus (selling off old guns to civilian sportsmen) as valid. In other cases disassembly (but not total destruction) of the gun was considered sufficient, as was “item attrition” (say, a Garand with a warped barrel and cracked stock) upon which it ceased to exist on paper but perhaps not physically.

Why this matters is that when a private American citizen wants to reimport WWII firearms today, sometimes “old chickens come home to roost”. Consider a hypothetical Nation X which had, in past years, disposal-through-surplus sold WWII guns to local civilian hunters, sold others by-the-pound disassembled as scrap parts, and attrited others as worn-out but then later “off the books” auctioned them locally. If a gun broker in that nation now in the 2020s owns enough to make an offer to an American reimporter, this may be blocked by the State Department or ATF as the guns had been “improperly” disposed of many years ago.

how do parts work?

Since 1972 ATF considers a rifle’s receiver to be “the actual gun” so to speak. During 1985, ATF ruled (Reg 85-10) that Curio & Relics only applies to whole firearms. So, if a M1 Garand abroad was intact, it was C&R eligible, but if that very same rifle was disassembled abroad the receiver would be totally reimport-ineligible while the remaining parts were considered foreign origin. ATF’s logic was that a WWII rifle is a keepsake, a bag of parts is not. During 1997 President Clinton effectively elevated GI rifle barrels of military aid guns to the same regulatory level as receivers; either never-used replacement barrels or ones salvaged off disposals. Finally during 2004 ATF decreed that MAP reversionary rights outlive the gun. Say for example, a foreign nation properly destroys a MAP-supplied Garand by cutting the barrel once and receiver twice. Anything that survives (pins, springs, buttplate, sights, etc) still has rights reserved even though the parent rifle is legally “dead”.

the comingling problem

It might seem that so many programs, with differing regulations, could get confusing – especially when a recipient nation had military aid spread out over multiple decades and multiple programs. During 1958, a White House staffer under President Eisenhower advised Congress that it would someday be difficult to untangle all the reserved rights.

He was correct. On 23 June 1981 the General Accounting Office advised President Reagan’s SecDef Casper Weinberger there was no up-to-date ledger of all post-WWII military aid (by then 71 nations) inclusive of rights still reserved, payment statuses, and end-of-life rules. So many WWII firearms had been transferred in so many batches under so many programs, that the USA’s government itself was starting to lose track.

(Thai soldier with a M1D sniper’s Garand during 2010. This particular one still has the WWII M84 optics and was made before January 1945 as it lacks a flash suppressor. The Garand is designated Type 88 Self-Loader in Thai nomenclature.) (photo by Jack Kurtz)

Thailand received a small number of M1 Garands via 1950s MDAP and then an unknown number via DCS from Interarms. Thailand received 45,980 M1 Garands via MAP, in an 11 year span from 1963 – 1974, via 10 different tranches – each of which may or may not have reversionary rights status different from the other tranches.

(Indonesian officer candidates with M1 Garands during 2025. The WWII rifles are used for basic instruction only.)

Indonesia received 24,418 M1 Garands as MAP aid during 1963, then another 56,385 through a mixture of multiple FMS buys and a half-dozen MAP tranches between 1964 – 1971, plus a small number “outside the official ecosystem” from foreign arms dealers. As with the Thai situation above, each tranche may or may not have a different rights status than the others.

(Cadets of the Philippines Maritime Institute stack M1 Garands, part of the 86,000-rifle repatriation to the USA’s Civilian Marksmanship Program.)

The Philippines is an extreme example. While still an American commonwealth Filipino units received both M1 carbines, and M1 Garand and M1903 Springfield rifles, as direct issue during WWII’s final year. After WWII additional guns were acquired through FLC and then 36,930 Garands through MDAP. Upon independence still more were acquired as American military bases were relinquished; these often not being documented at all. A total of 11,597 M1 Garands were acquired through MAP in two tranches (1963 and 1964) out of US Army Pacific Command warehouses. Within the arms dealer community it was strongly felt (but never proven) that some MAP M1 Garands for South Vietnam were illegally resold to the Philippines during the early 1970s with a corrupt ARVN general pocketing the cash. Finally during the Marcos years, still more Garands were acquired from arms dealers. In all the Philippines is thought to have held around 1 out of every 49 Garands ever made.

why this is a headache now

Comingling is an obstacle for any prospective reimporter. As outlined later below he needs to prove that WWII American firearms were not grant aid, and are not under any remaining reversionary rights. This becomes very complicated when the host nation received them through different military aid programs in multiple tranches.

how was this officially resolved?

Honestly it never really has been. Since guns are fungible (any one Garand is the same as any other) a decision needs to be made when the host nation has inventory of mixed MAP statuses. One resolution is “totality of the whole”….say, Nation X has 1,000 Garands: 600 MAP with reversionary rights still intact, 400 with rights extinguished. If a prospective reimporter wants to bring 400 or fewer back into the USA, it may (or may not) be approved. The problem here is that somebody needs to accurately track MAP rights statuses, otherwise Nation X could for example, request to resell not 400 at once but instead 160, 271, and 193 over three years…..each smaller than the rights-extinguished tranche but together, larger than it.

A similar problem is FMS sales where “credits” had been partially applied: say Nation X paid $10,000 for one FMS buy of 10,000 M1 Garands; mixing $7,000 of FMF credits and $3,000 of their own money. Now decades later they want to sell 3,000 rifles to a civilian American reimporter. Obviously a rifle can’t be chopped into 1⁄3 rds. It could be said that the 30% of their own money was the part spent on these specific 3,000 guns making them eligible – or – it could be said that the $7,000 of FMF is apportioned throughout all 10,000 thereby “poisoning” them all. Usually the State Department goes with that and blocks reimportation. However it has never really been resolved.

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understanding the difference between private civilian reimportation and the Civilian Marksmanship Program

The Civilian Marksmanship Program is a government-chartered non-profit. It offers surplus American military guns to qualified buyers; who must be 21 or older, hold membership in a listed civic group, and actively participate in shooting-related activities. CMP draws inventory from military surplus within the USA and abroad, from MAP aid still with reversionary rights.

(Gunsmith Robert Bell with a M1 Garand at the CMP’s Port Clinton, OH facility. Repatriated rifles are cleaned, serviced, graded, and then made available for sale.) (photo via CMP)

The difference is that while private reimporters are barred from rifles which had been grant aid, or still have reversionary rights intact; CMP is not and in fact just the opposite: it is their only eligible way to obtain stock abroad.

A big (86,000 M1 Garands) CMP repatriation was from the Philippines during President Trump’s first term. Of the 86,000 only 11,597 were MAP aid with rights intact. The workaround for the remainder (which Filipino tax money had went into years ago) is that the Philippines donated them to the United States. This was done as a goodwill gesture and also to alleviate current-day Filipino taxpayers of their disposal cost.

(Employees of the Defense Logistics Agency inventory the Garands while they were still in the Philippines.) (official War Department photo)

Recent CMP lots (smaller than the 2018 Philippines one) have come from Turkey and Greece.

(A case of Greek-repatriated M1 Garands at the CMP during 2025. These are believed to be Hellenic Navy rifles.)

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how a private reimportation of American WWII-era rifles would work

A prospective reimporter must have ATF Type I ($200 one time) and ATF Type VIII ($150 every 12 months) licenses. These must be held before the process begins. The very first step is ATF Form 6, the same paperwork needed to import any gun, new or old, civilian or milsurp. However on the indicated area below, the second box is checked if the desired guns were once MDAP or MAP aid, or the third box if they had been FMS or a DCS. This then starts “the bag of worms”.

the State Department phase

If either of those boxes are checked, ATF demands a letter from the State Department. ATF will summarily reject any Form 6 with a box checked but without a State Department letter stapled to it.

The responsible entity is the Bureau Of Political-Military Affairs, an obscure sub-bureaucracy of the State Department located on E Street in Washington DC. The Bureau has the assumption that every WWII-era American firearm abroad is grant aid and has reversionary rights still reserved, until the prospective reimporter proves them wrong on both counts.

For MDAP- or MAP-origin arms, the Bureau will work with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, a Pentagon bureaucracy, to verify the prospective reimporter’s claims. For FMS, it uses State Department records.

The first thing needed is a signed letter from the host nation that the guns were not grant aid, and have all reversionary rights extinguished. Next comes the hardest part of the whole process.

proving eligibility of the guns

The host nation’s letter, while required, alone is usually insufficient proof. Depending on how inquisitive the Bureau Of Political-Military Affairs feels, the prospective reimporter might need to further convince them that the desired guns were not grant aid and have no reversionary rights remaining. Because so many years have passed, this is extremely difficult. Some things that might help include transcripts of Congressional committee minutes, the recipient army’s records if available, overseas bank remittances to the Defense Department, and old embassy telegrams. These things are not easily accessible. It may take hours and hours of microfiche scrolling, or a by-appointment box pull at the National Archives.

The records are sometimes shoddy. Some FLC and MDAP aid was “batchlotted”, where the manifest was simply “(x) of assorted surplus firearms and munitions“. During the first decade of MAP, there was no standard nomenclature and sometimes the description was just “U.S. RIFLES .30 CAL“. Some records may no longer exist at all. For example, the ledger of FLC sales in the Caribbean basin region during the first 5 years after WWII is believed to have been accidentally shredded during 1986.

The problem becomes acute when the host nation has comingled status. Here, the prospective reimporter may have to research all tranches through all aid programs –  not just the one where the rifles he wants came from.

Finally the Defense Security Cooperation Agency will advise the Bureau Of Political-Military Affairs if the weapons are battlefield-obsolete. For small arms, “obsolete” means no longer in the US Army’s TO&E and 30+ years old, of which WWII guns obviously are both.

If satisfied with all of the above, the Bureau Of Political-Military Affairs will craft a letter that the guns were not grant aid or still have reversionary rights. This is not an “approval”, it merely advises ATF to proceed with its own determination.

the ATF phase

Reimporting ex-military aid USML Class Ia guns falls under 27 CFR §447.57. The prospective reimporter sends the Form 6 with the attached State Department letter to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

ATF will first verify that the Curio & Relics guns are still C&R eligible. Guns on the C&R List must be those actual guns: copies or clones are excluded, as are “substantially modified” guns. Surprisingly ATF has been pretty lenient with the latter over the years. Some WWII M1 carbines reimported from South Korea have stocks of chu wood, a tree which doesn’t even grow in the USA. Some M1 Garands brought back have aftermarket Italian-made sights or barrels. In both cases they were allowed.

ATF will next qualify the source. Gun imports (any gun, of any type or any era) can be barred by origin and/or origination. “Origin” is where it was originally made; here irrelevant…..all of the USA’s WWII weapons were made in the USA. “Origination” is the nation where a particular import is starting from. There are two origination blacklists; Customs and ATF. As a rule, any origination that Customs blacklists, ATF does too; however there are several more on ATF’s blacklist.

(Iranian soldier with a M1 Garand during the 1980 – 1988 war against Iraq. Quite obviously Iran is a blacklisted origination.)

Finally ATF will verify that the WWII guns do not violate state or local law at either the intended port-of-entry or the prospective reimporter’s business address.

If satisfied with all of the above, ATF will issue an import license along with two blank Form 6As.

The prospective reimporter now needs a EUC and export license. The End User Certificate is just his statement that the guns are for civilian sale in the USA. The export license is issued by the host nation.

the Customs phase

The reimporter now has all four necessary “keys”: 1) export license 2) import license 3) EUC 4) the Form 6A receipts.

Goods crossing the USA’s border must be in IPPC-compliant pallets and boxes, and will usually need new pest-proof packaging. Depending on origination, sometimes the wood-stock WWII guns themselves have to be fumigated.

(Warehoused M1 Garands in South Korea during 2017. These old crates would not be IPPC-compliant to come back to the USA.) (photo via Garand Collectors Association)

At the port-of-entry, the shipment is inspected by Customs & Border Protection agents. If satisfactory, one of the Form 6A receipts is given to Customs, and the other 6A is filled out by the reimporter. The reimporter has 15 days to turn this in to ATF. All serial numbers must be listed, so if this wasn’t done still in the host nation, he needs to move fast. ATF will compare the reimporter’s 6A with Customs’s 6A to verify everything lines up. Finally an import engraving must be added to each gun. Upon that the transaction is complete. The reimporter must retain this paperwork for 6 years.

how does this compare to other WWII milsurp?

If the private American citizen wanted to import say, WWII German 98ks or WWII Soviet Mosin-Nagants instead of WWII American guns; the process would start the same with the Form 6 as the first step. However he would just send that alone directly in to ATF and the process would jump to the import license decision.

So as can be seen, its much more difficult to reimport vintage WWII American guns into America than to import foreign WWII guns.

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various stories and situations

saga of South Korea’s Garands

For readers who made it this far, I suspect this is why, as this situation was notable within the firearms community.

(photo via Asia Economy Daily newspaper)

South Korea received its first M1 Garands via direct issue during the Korean War. South Korea received 349,482 M1 Garands via 14 different MAP tranches between 1963 – 1973. Additional Garands came as MAP-RDA from other American allies retiring the rifle. All told, South Korea had as many as 400,000. Not all were issued, some went straight to storage as the core of South Korea’s emergency war reserve. As for M1 carbines, South Korea is thought to have held one million at peak, via every imaginable method.

The M16 replaced the M1 Garand as the ROK Army’s standard rifle during the 1970s and when issue of the Daewoo K1 started in 1983, in secondary roles as well.

South Korea had extinguished the reversionary rights on all its WWII-generation military aid rifles by the mid-1980s. Small batches of both M1 Garand rifles and M1 carbines were reimported at that time, including by Exel Arms of Massachusetts.

Blue Sky Garands

The late Rene Carlos Vos was the man behind Blue Sky Productions of Arlington, VA; which made (by far) the largest single private reimportation of American WWII weapons after the AECA became law. The guns were 200,000 M1 Garands from South Korea, where during 1984 the ROK Defense Ministry was offering them at $65 ($207 in 2026 dollars) each. This was brought to Mr. Vos’s attention by Dong Choi, a California businessman who followed South Korean news.

During July 1986 Blue Sky received an ATF import license. The first batch of 40,000 shipped in August 1986, and was impounded by US Customs the moment it reached California. The basis was alleged bribery in South Korea (later disproven) and violation of the AECA, even though Blue Sky had done all the steps properly. As mentioned earlier, this was during the “bizarre time” when two laws were on the books demanding opposite outcomes: must be allowed yet must not be allowed.

Quite unusually, Congress slipped language into a totally unrelated law that if any arms reimport license on or after 1 July 1986 had been suspended, it was reinstated. While Blue Sky was not mentioned, it was obviously about them: July 1986 was not random, it was when their license was granted. A clause was added that the White House had a certain number of days to reject reinstated licenses. President Reagan simply ignored the matter and when that period expired, Blue Sky’s license was reinstated by default.

(photo via Guns International)

Blue Sky Garands have a mixed reputation today. Rifles which Blue Sky had to refurbish are hit and miss. Some had their GI furniture replaced by repro stocks and most are “mixmasters” with parts from various Garands. If a rifle needed refinishing, Blue Sky used a cheap zinc phosphate instead of the milspec WWII blueing, resulting in a “chalky grey” look. What they are most remembered for are is the import engraving. Most gun importers keep this as small as ATF legally allows. Blue Sky went with a gigantic stamp on the side of the barrel as seen above.

During President Clinton’s second term the USA started to take a harder stance against private reimportation of legacy military aid rifles.

(Pakistani soldiers drill with MAP-supplied M1 Garands during the mid-1960s. An attempt to privately reimport these was blocked by the Clinton administration during 1997.)

With that, the South Koreans opted to stand still for the time being until the political climate in Washington changed.

the ongoing fiasco

During 2007 South Korea wanted to totally dispose of all remaining M1 Garands and some M1 carbines. This was towards the tail end of President George W. Bush’s second term and looked to have good chances. The guns already had all their reversionary rights extinguished.

The South Korean auction was won by Century Arms. It was for 87,310 M1 Garands and 22,000 M1 carbines. The Garands had a price of $220/ea according to the Korea Times newspaper. Their potential value on the collector’s market was estimated at $108 million which worked out to a projected $1,237 retail. However the rifles were said to include a few early “gas trap Garands” and some with 3-digit serials; either of which typically gets $10,000+ at auction. Some were Anniston Arsenal refurbishments done during the early 1960s, others straight from WWII.

Amazingly, some are still in Springfield Cans. Officially “LTSP Containers” these held ten rifles. About a third of a million M1 Garands were “canned” between 1947 – 1950.

(photo via SWAT magazine)

South Korea intended these as emergency war reserves and never issued the “canned” rifles. Presumably they have been untouched by human hands since the late 1940s.

President Barack Obama took office in January 2009. The State Department is in the executive branch and as is typical when the party holding the White House changes, things went on hiatus until new personnel took over. By late 2009 the evaluation was back underway and looked to be non-controversial. During September 2009, the ROK Defense Ministry was describing the sale in the past tense.

However in March 2010, the State Department issued a negative letter. Their justification was a “…in the national interest” clause which allowed refusal even if MAP rights were extinguished. The White House said the “national interest” was keeping guns out of criminal hands. This was ridiculed; for example it is hard to imagine the Bloods and Crips street gangs selecting a 3’8″-long, 8-shot WWII rifle for drive-by shootings. In any case it blocked the deal.

During 2011, the State Department indicated it might be willing to allow Century to reimport the Garands, but not the carbines. The reason was that at that time, the Democrat party was using detachable external magazines as one criteria to “define an assault rifle”. With this, Century restarted the process to get only the Garands.

However on 8 March 2013 President Obama again reversed course, in the most dramatic way imaginable. Executive Order 13637 forbade not only the South Korean deal, but any civilian reimportation of WWII-era guns. Furthermore this was not just legacy military aid, but also any OMC-licensed commercial deal, effectively anything and everything. This then definitively quashed the South Korean deal and Century had to lay off 41 employees.

how the E.O. was constitutional

An executive order can not override actual laws. President Obama’s order first repealed President Carter’s E.O. 11958 which the previous five presidents had used. It was replaced by a new approval framework, where the secretaries of State and Defense got an “initial look” before the process described earlier above started. By this, it was not conflicting with existing law, but inserting a new step before it. An E.O. did not have authority to ban reimportation altogether. However, the Secretary of State (John Kerry) hinted that every single case would get denied individually. This then gave the result of a total ban, but in a way that was not challengeable.

President Obama also moved the United States Munitions List (the whole USML itself) beyond judicial purview. This preemptively blocked any attempt to have a judge declare that WWII guns were no longer realistic “defense articles”.

leaked ATF memo

During 2017 ATF official Robert Turk authored an internal memo on how gun regulations might be streamlined. It was stamped “Not for public distribution” but was leaked to the Washington Post newspaper. Section 3 dealt with private reimportation of WWII guns. It stated that considering the huge number of Garands already surplused domestically, any abroad were essentially a drop in the bucket by now and that the Curio & Relic guns “…..do not represent any discernable public safety concern.” No action was taken, however.

why didn’t the Civilian Marksmanship Program step in to help?

Because they can’t. The CMP can only draw from military surplus within the USA, or if abroad, MAP guns with reversionary rights still in place. South Korea’s Garands are neither.

could South Korea sell them elsewhere?

Yes and No. The United States would have no way of stopping them. However it is unrealistic. No army on Earth wants WWII rifles in the 21st century, this leaves only civilian sale. If the USA is excluded, no market in the world is big enough to ingest this many collector’s rifles.

President Trump’s first term

Through the convoluted system set up by President Obama, there were several reimportations between 2017 – 2021. Some of the WWII American guns Royal Tiger brought home from Africa are thought to have been transacted in this time. However nothing more happened with the South Korean Garands.

President Biden’s term

President Joe Biden resumed using the Obama-era E.O. as a de facto total ban. He further added more regulatory burdens and record-keeping rules. These additional regulations did not last long, they took effect in 2024 and were repealed by President Trump in 2025.

President Trump’s second term

On 6 February 2026 President Trump signed E.O. 14383 to bolster exports of American weapons. Why it possibly matters is that §1¶(j) and §1¶(k) of President Obama’s E.O. 13637 were stricken and replaced by a new framework whereby the Secretary of War now has “first glance” in a more streamlined setup. Why only possibly is that while it definitely applies to exports, it is unclear if it would also apply to private reimportation. The relevant part of President Trump’s E.O. (§4) unfortunately uses the nouns “transfers” and “sales”, not specifically export, import, or reimport. The E.O. was effective immediately but implementation will not start until mid-2026 (about 2 months from now as I write this in April). After that there will probably need to be a first “test case” to determine how it might affect reimportation.

South Korea definitely still has the M1 carbines; it is unclear if they are still storing the M1 Garands in 2026.

instance of the INP M1 carbines

The Israel National Police force, or INP, used WWII American M1 carbines for many years. Israeli carbines typically have a “50” stamping, this indicating being zeroed at 50m (54½ yds). Yitzhak Ammunition in Nazareth made .30 Carbine ammo to support them.

This particular case in 2009 related to Contact International, a company in Ma’ale Adumim which is an eastern suburb of Jerusalem. The owner Zev Kaptowsky held a valid Israeli arms dealing license. During 2009 he purchased a batch of WWII M1 carbines being disposed of by the INP, under condition that he have them out of Israel within 100 days. Mr. Kaptowsky wanted to export into the USA 2,500 M1 carbines and 2,500 15rds mags, at a declared value of $220 each. He possessed a letter from the INP that these 2,500 had not been military aid, were not subject to reversionary rights, and had been in Israel for 30 years.

The hangup was whether Contact International fully owned the guns, or was acting as agent for the prospective American reimporter. If the latter, they are required to pre-register with the USA’s government. In any case the dispute also shows some other aspects of reimporting M1 carbines, especially from Israel but generally anywhere.

Israel “officially” received 10,000 M1 carbines via FMS in 1978. There were obviously more than that in Israel, where the rest came from is not certain. (There is one example in private hands with American, Norwegian, and Israeli markings; how that happened is anybody’s guess.) So this makes the comingling issue already more difficult.

A bigger issue is that the M1 carbine was really popular with police worldwide after WWII: not just in Israel but is places as varied as Japan, Bolivia, Spain, Honduras, and the Netherlands. The .30 Carbine cartridge has less “carry” and wall penetration downrange but was still lethal in law enforcement settings. Police in some nations obtained the carbines as their army retired them, which obviously seems logical (especially if their money had been paid to extinguish the USA’s rights) but is today considered a “past irregular status change” by the State Department and ATF, especially if they had originally been a MAP grant or EDA.

Alternatively foreign police departments could directly get M1 carbines via FMS. The State Department classified this as police aid; why that mattered is that it deducted “credits” all the same but did not count against that nation’s overall military aid cap in Congress. Now years later this makes untangling the rights statuses even more difficult.

Going back to this particular case, Mr. Kaptowsky complained that Contact International had sold M1 carbines to reimporters in the USA during 2007 and there had been no problems, and nothing was different with this deal. This highlights another aspect: both ATF and the State Department enjoy the legal liberty of sui generis est (no precedent is set by any decision; the next can be totally opposite).

the Guatemala circus

This might be a good ending story because it has many of the hurdles wrapped up into one.

(Guatemalan army honor guard with M1 Garands.)

Guatemala obtained small numbers of M1 carbines and M1903 Springfield rifles as WWII lend-lease and then FLC sales. During 1954, the arms dealer Sam Cummings bartered 3,108 M1 Garands to Guatemala in exchange for a mixed bag of other weapons. (Interestingly these Garands had been Lend-Leased to the UK during WWII, reimported by Interarms in 1954, then exported a second time.) Guatemala obtained another 1,445 Garands through seven MAP tranches.

To set this all up Grupo de Representaciones Internationales S.A. (GIR S.A. in English) is a Guatemalan company established during 1996. Besides doing depot-level upkeep of the army’s weapons, GIR S.A. buys, sells, and repairs guns. It is the “outflow agent” for Guatemalan military surplus, and also imports and wholesales modern civilian firearms to sporting goods stores. The CEO of GIR S.A. at the time was Ori Zoller, an Israeli citizen with Guatemalan residency.

This all started with a post-9/11 investigation into possible links between al-Queda, the African diamond trade, and Central American banks. That investigation uncovered the unrelated Otterloo Affair. During 1999 police in Nicaragua and GIR S.A. set up a three-way deal: Nicaraguan police bartered 5,000 AK-47s to GIR S.A. for Jericho pistols more suitable for police duty. The third party was the arms dealer Shimon Yelinek, acting as agent for the Panamanian government, which wanted to buy the ex-Nicaraguan AK-47s from GIR S.A.

In fact, Panama was not involved at all. Mr. Yelinek forged a fake Panamanian EUC and fake Panamanian import license. With this, DECAM (the Guatemalan arms licensing authority) issued a valid export license. DECAM did not require the AK-47s to physically transit Guatemala and after the Jerichos were delivered the AK-47s were loaded onto a freighter M/V Otterloo still in Nicaragua. M/V Otterloo departed Nicaragua, zipped right past Panama and delivered the AK-47s to a proscribed paramilitary group in Colombia.

While investigating the Otterloo Affair the State Department discovered yet another new thing to investigate during 2008.

During 2007, the Guatemalan treasury was unable to pay debts owed to GIR S.A. and instead offered surplus WWII-era Guatemalan army rifles as compensation, to which the company accepted. Some of these were worn or inoperable, which Guatemala considered item attrition; this not in line with current American interpretation (MAP 6.5.2) of “destroyed”. All were still in Guatemala, under Guatemalan law – however the State Department’s current view is that this transfer was a past “irregular status change”.

GIR S.A. sold a quantity (described as “uno TEU” aka one 21′ ocean container) of M1 Garands to an American reimporter, possibly Century. To be perfectly clear, Century was never charged with any wrongdoing, let alone convicted, and it’s not even 100% certain it was them. However numerous Guatemalan newspapers said it was Century as did the Palm Beach Post newspaper in the USA. There is little reason to think it was anybody else. (Interestingly Mr. Zoller said he considered trying to disassemble and sell the Otterloo Affair AKs as 922(r)-compliant parts to Century and dumping Mr. Yelinek out of the deal.) During 2008 the State Department determined this should not have happened as the WWII rifles were still under MAP reversionary rights.

GIR S.A. contested first the comingling problem: in their view, who’s to say that these particular Garands didn’t come from the Sam Cummings deal instead of MAP? (The rebuttal would be the “poison apple theory” in that they then all are restricted.) Secondly, GIR S.A. felt indemnified on both ends: if the Guatemalan army gave them Garands still under MAP rights, that was their fault. If the American reimporter held a valid State Department letter, why would anybody in Guatemala believe otherwise?

There were additional difficulties besides comingled statuses. Guatemala fought a terrible, decades-long civil war and legitimately can’t objectively audit all past American military aid…..who’s to say now if a M1 Garand lost in combat during the 1970s or 1980s had actually been black-marketed during the 1990s?

(Guatemalan soldier with M1 Garand during that nation’s civil war.)

Additionally the UNE party won Guatemala’s 2007 election and fired most officials of the previous administration. So now in 2008 anybody who had any firsthand knowledge of the guns-for-debt deal with GIR S.A. was gone.

Still yet another wrinkle emerged in 2008 – 2009. While examining GIR S.A.’s records, it was discovered that Century had purchased previous small lots of WWII guns in Guatemala and reimporteed them, going back as far as the 1990s. The State Department determined that these had still been MAP rights-restricted as well. Here there’s no harm in naming Century…..it definitely was them, and it was perfectly legal, all done by-the-book. How this happened is that the State Department messed up: either past officials didn’t check MAP statuses deeply enough – or – now in 2008 the officials were mistakenly slapping rights on tranches which legitimately didn’t have them.

Nothing tangible became of all this. However since then, reimport requests of Latin American originations is “under a microscope”.

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postscript

Reimported WWII rifles are only a small fraction of those on the American collectors market today. For example during the late 1970s, as military aid orders for M1 Garands ended, the US Army told Congress it still had 700,000+ M1 Garands in storage within the USA; this on top of all the ones which had been domestically surplused over the years.

The highwater mark of reimportation was around the turn of the millennium. This was when allies abroad were discharging the last of their warehoused WWII-era rifles from long-ago American military aid. Between 2000 and President Obama’s E.O of 2013, roughly 250,000 M1 Garands, M1903 Springfields, and M1 carbines were legally reimported back into the USA. Excluding the big South Korean lot, by the mid-2020s there are not a whole lot left abroad which could possibly fit the legal framework to come back home.