Erdoğan Gave NATO Leaders Personalised Guns. Chaos Ensued.
Turkey's President Erdoğan gave heads of state engraved revolvers as parting gifts. Their governments then had to establish, urgently, what their own firearms laws said about that.
Bart De Wever flew home from a NATO summit with a .357 Magnum revolver and live ammunition in his luggage. The Belgian prime minister reportedly did not know he had it, until someboyd opened his gift box once he landed in Brussels.
The weapon was one of the parting gifts presented by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after the alliance met in Ankara on 7 and 8 July. Each red box, lined in black, held a revolver engraved with the recipient’s name, six cartridges and a note waiving Turkish export controls.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was the first to mention the gift, telling journalists on his flight home. Officials from several delegations described the scenes among their security teams, suddenly responsible for functioning firearms and boxes of ammunition, as “insane”.
What followed was a continent-wide exercise in firearms law.
The waivers allowed the guns to leave Turkey. They did nothing to satisfy the import, possession and registration rules waiting at the other end. Under the EU firearms directive, the ammunition is subject to the same acquisition and possession arrangements as the gun it fits. No recipient is reported to be under criminal investigation; every reported response involved transfer to an embassy, a police service or another authorised custodian.
The choice of gift drew criticism beyond the logistics. British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore called engraved guns “totems of macho Mafia autocratic Caesarism”. Selim Kuneralp, a retired Turkish ambassador, wrote that he wished his country had chosen a gift representing its culture rather than firearms that recalled the habits of Gulf monarchies.
Why did Erdoğan choose revolvers?
Images released by the Lithuanian presidency show a Gümüşay .357 Magnum, a rare six-shooter produced by Turkish state arms maker MKE in the 1990s. The presentation box identified it as “the first revolver-type handgun produced in our country”, and the recipient’s name was engraved on the barrel. The Lithuanian images show six cartridges; Reuters reported that Starmer’s delegation received 500 rounds and a cleaning kit.
