Foreign Policy | 05/26/2025
On Jan. 29, 2022, Sir Michael Morgan Jr., an 18-year-old member of the Muscogee Nation, shot and killed Isaiah Jones, also 18, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Morgan couldn’t legally own a handgun, so he had borrowed one—a 9 mm semi-automatic Canik pistol with room for 19 rounds of fire.
The shooting coincided with the United States’ peak COVID-19 outbreak, when Americans were buying guns in record quantities and those guns were turning up at crime scenes at record pace. But as inflation rose and some U.S. factories closed for pandemic lockdowns, guns were increasingly imported from countries where production was cheaper and uninterrupted.
Leading that trend was Turkey, which since 2021 has been the United States’ top gun exporter. And top among Turkish brands is Canik, owned by the parent company Samsun Yurt Savunma (SYS).
At the time of Jones’s murder, the Canik pistol had become a hot commodity, uniquely suited for the growing U.S. market. Gun designers and marketers were trying to expand their customer base among women, children, and Black consumers like Morgan and Jones, and Canik’s 9 mm pistol—designed for small hands, with an easy-to-use trigger and a light frame—was ideal for a shooter with little experience. More importantly, the Canik pistol was cheap, usually costing less than $400
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Naomi Cohen | journalist 