SWman said:
What proportion of sale are civilian? Looks like if the U.S. didn't have a 2nd amendment and a strong gun lobby Glocks might be Austria's gun.
Most gun makers in the world have two legal options, sell to military and police, or sell to the US civilian population.
Large contracts with a military can be great or horrible. They can end a contract and leave you with no recourse and lacking customers, or buy huge numbers at a time and generate vast profits. They are not a dependable constant source of money, and as your only customer make innovation difficult.
Invent something in the civilian market and some may buy it, others will not, and it may at least pay for itself and make some profit. This at least allows you to be creative (like say Kel Tec.) Invent something for the military market and they don't adopt it? Dead end, at least for the foreseeable future and budgets you must balance.
This makes a civilian market much more fluid and ideal, even if you don't get the same bulk sales when things go well.
The result is most gun makers ideally want to sell in the American market, the largest market there is. Especially if they are playing by all the NATO and UN, and EU laws that make export to other potential markets really difficult.
The US gun laws on imports do limit things though.
There is a lot of rules importers must follow that domestic manufacturers do not. Giving most of the CCW market to domestic production for example because small guns, .380 chambered guns, etc don't score enough points to import, and features are required that make them hard to produce in a price competitive manner with American produced models.
Many of the more popular guns in the US are not legal for import. Even many of the Glocks have been imported in a configuration different from the one they are sold in because they don't score enough points for legal import.
Both pistols and revolvers must score a minimum number of points on two different points by feature systems for import, while domestic manufacturers don't have to score any points.
A Ruger LCP or Kel-Tec P3AT for example, popular guns in the US, would never be legal to import and nearly impossible to put into a configuration that would allow it.
Then there is 922(r) for long guns.
Many guns perfectly legal to produce, sell, and own in the US are illegal to import into the US.
This puts foreign manufacturers at a significant disadvantage to those producing guns within the US, and they cannot even take part in large proportions of the market. But it is still the largest market in the world, so if they can find a niche or way in they will.
The other option many take is to open a manufacturing facility in the US to get around the import restrictions.