Was Erdoğan's gun gift a faux pas or an old-school diplomatic tradition?
When NATO leaders opened their gift boxes from the Turkish president and found a .357 Magnum revolver, some panicked and others laughed. But gifting heads of state lavish, personalised firearms is a tradition as old as Samuel Colt — and as recent as a Czech pistol presented to Trump in 2019.
When NATO leaders left the two-day summit in Ankara with a parting gift, most of them did not bother to look inside the gift bags they were carrying.
In fact, it wasn’t until UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and a handful of other heads of government first opened the lavish wooden boxes they received from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that they realised the black felt-lined burgundy chest carried a .357 Magnum revolver toted by the likes of Dirty Harry — or rather, its Turkish-made equivalent.
The discovery caused panic among some, most notably Belgian Premier Bart De Wever, whose staff took a photo of the box in a paper gift tote on the Brussels airport tarmac, having discovered the carefully personalised chrome piece only after landing back home.
The delegations’ security teams were further frenzied by the fact that the box also carried six live rounds, throwing heads of state in a loop over how to best handle the firearm.
Others like Canadian PM Mark Carney were amused, with Carney cracking a joke that his gift of maple syrup “kind of undermatched” the glitzy, powerful handgun.
But however unusual it might seem, gifting a head of state a real, engraved firearm as a token of goodwill — or as a sales pitch — is one of the oldest customs in diplomacy and arms manufacturing, as common in the West as it is elsewhere in the world.
Recep’s got a gun
The story blew up on social media, painting a picture of an unpredictable strongman springing an "unusual," or even faintly menacing gift on allies who do things differently.
The Gümüşay .357 Magnum that Erdogan gifted to his NATO allies is a six-shot revolver originally developed in the 1990s by a since-shuttered manufacturer in Gümüşhane, with the remaining stock later taken into the inventory of state arms maker MKE.
Each pistol, engraved with its recipient's name and boxed with the Turkish flag and NATO emblem, also doubles as marketing: Turkey has become the world's third-largest small-arms exporter in recent years, and it wants its industry to grow even further.
Turkish media reported Erdoğan in Ankara paired the revolver with a second gift: a signed copy of his own English-language biography, The Politics of Courage: Erdoğan and the Rise of Türkiye, plus a personal letter and a fountain pen.
The Turkish presidency's Communications Directorate has since confirmed that the gift took place but has provided no further explanation at this time.
Colt did it first
Gifting firearms to friends and allies is an industrial-age version of the custom of presenting ceremonial swords, common among Europe’s aristocracies.
French kings issued ceremonial swords inscribed "Ex Dono Regis" (“given by the king”) as battlefield honours, including to allied foreign officers during the American Revolutionary War.
In the 1850s, when Samuel Colt travelled through Europe and the Ottoman Empire, he personally presented a gold-inlaid, custom-engraved revolver to Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I.
After Colt pointedly mentioned to the sultan that the Russians were already buying his pistols, Abdülmecid ordered five thousand.
Colt had used the identical pitch on the Russians months earlier, presenting gold-inlaid revolvers with patriotic American motifs to Tsar Nicholas I in late 1854, in the middle of the Crimean War. Indicatively, US arms manufacturers supplied both sides in that conflict.
Colt's rival Oliver Winchester did the same thing except at home. He commissioned a gold-mounted, engraved Henry rifle and presented it personally to US President Abraham Lincoln, in a clear bid to win the administration's favour for wartime rifle contracts.
Decades later, future President Theodore Roosevelt — a gun lover and personal collector — gave a gold-plated Winchester Model 1895 to Leonard Wood, the US military governor of Cuba, inscribed with the date and his own name.
Over the years, sitting US presidents and other officials have received firearms as gifts from citizens, veterans' groups, and manufacturers.
In 1870, Ulysses S Grant was gifted a Smith & Wesson Model No. 1½ revolver, while Grover Cleveland was presented with an unusual Colt 8-gauge shotgun, custom-built and gold-inlaid with his name on the trigger guard.
John F Kennedy was gifted a Colt Single Action Army revolver, engraved with the presidential seal and "JFK," its serial number set to "PT109" after his WWII patrol boat.
Harry Truman was given several unique firearms during his presidency, including an ornate 1911 and an Officer's Model Colt .22 revolver, presented to him by the then-president of the manufacturing company himself.
Once in office, Roosevelt himself received a finely engraved .450-500 double rifle from arms importer Frederick Adolph, apparently presented in an effort to generate publicity for Adolph's firearms business.
Shotguns for Eisenhower
The practice did not die out over time. In 1959, Nikita Khrushchev arrived in Washington in what was the first visit by a communist Soviet premier to US soil and personally selected a pair of elaborately engraved shotguns as gifts for President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of Defence Neil McElroy.
The shotguns, crafted at the Izhevsk arms works and bearing hand-carved hunting scenes in gold and silver, moved through customs without incident — in the middle of the Cold War.
And as recently as 2019, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš delivered a limited-edition domestically made, gold-plated CZ 75 pistol to US President Donald Trump, engraved with his birth year.
"We are proud that our product was chosen as a state gift of the Czech Republic to the US president,” the manufacturer Česká zbrojovka posted on Instagram right after the meeting of the two heads of state.
Occasionally, gifts of this kind do cause an incident: in December 2022, Poland's police chief Jarosław Szymczyk brought back an anti-tank grenade launcher from Ukraine that he had received as a gift.
The device exploded in his office, slightly injuring him and causing extensive damage to the police headquarters in Warsaw.
The tradition of gifting swords also remains very much alive today: in March 2025, King Charles III bestowed a sword bearing his royal cypher on Canada's Usher of the Black Rod at Buckingham Palace, as a symbol of Canadian sovereignty amid Trump's annexation threats.
'We will gift more'
European Commission President Ursula on der Leyen "expressed her thanks" to Erdoğan for the gift, her spokesman said, adding it would be decommissioned and donated to a military museum.
Luxembourg Prime Minister Luc Frieden's office said the revolver would be stored with all other "diplomatic gifts," but would first be made "irreversibly unusable".
The revolver presented to Polish President Karol Nawrocki also arrived safely, but with the necessary precautions and a previous incident still fresh in everyone's minds.
"It is certain that no one is going to fire it," a Nawrocki aide told a local radio station.
Croatian President Zoran Milanović derisively commented on Friday how Erdoğan had “palmed off pew-pews to us” at the summit. “I shoot from a different weapon,” he boasted.
Italy’s Premier Giorgia Meloni made no comment on the gift. Government sources in Rome told the Italian press that the weapon was handed over in Ankara to “personnel authorised to handle weapons,” and that it will be logged and kept at Palazzo Chigi following “common procedures for all gifts received by the prime minister.”
Şevki Yasin Soner, a Turkish gun enthusiast who runs a popular airsoft YouTube channel, told domestic media outlets that it is “actually a custom, an ancient Turkish tradition.”
"This revolver-type pistol, when you look at it in general, is a pistol that shows the quality of leadership. Looking back, it's one of the iconic pistols used by many former leaders and by leader-type figures in films too,” he explained.
“It should also be underlined that these pistols given to the leaders are produced entirely in Turkey… We are proud and happy on behalf of our country, God willing, we will gift more,” Soner shot back.
