Samuel Cummings

Samuel Cummings (February 7, 1927 – April 29, 1998) was an American small arms dealer. He founded the International Armament Corporation (also known as Interarms or Interarmco) in 1953, a company which came to dominate the free world market in private arms sales. He died on April 29, 1998, in Monaco after a series of strokes. and became interested in weapons after acquiring a Maxim gun from a disused American Legion hall at the age of five. Cummings became a US Army weapons specialist at Fort Lee, Virginia, after World War II. Following his military discharge he attended George Washington University on the GI Bill, where he was recruited in 1950 by the Central Intelligence Agency as a weapons expert.

Cummings then toured Europe, where he bought large quantities of surplus World War II weapons for both Hollywood productions and the Taiwan government These included .45 ACP Ballester-Molina pistols purchased from Argentina for British covert operations. During this time he was also called upon to identify captured weapons in the Korean War.

In 1953 Cummings set up Interarmco in Alexandria, Virginia, with a warehouse in Manchester, England, and other international locations to capitalize on the vast stores of postwar arms and ammunition. He used his contacts and expertise to acquire surplus weapons in large quantities to sell to various private and government buyers throughout the world. Interarmco was owned by the Central Intelligence Agency when Cummings took control, but he bought out the CIA interest and became sole owner in 1958.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Interarmco flooded the American market with military firearms, catering to souvenir-hungry GIs and sportsmen, and drastically undercutting domestic sporting-arms manufacturers. At the same time, Cummings became an export sales agent for various small arms manufacturers. Interarmco was an original exclusive agent for ArmaLite, and Cummings personally demonstrated its revolutionary AR-10 selective-fire rifle to various nations, including Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. In June 1959, the rebels invaded the Dominican Republic in a combined air/sea operation. Betrayed by local residents, the seaborne rebel forces (led by Cuban officers), were surprised at the water's edge; those dropping via parachute were hunted down in the following days by the Dominican army. When Cummings arrived in the Dominican Republic that same month to discuss the subject of arms sales with the nation's arms procurement officer, an enraged Trujillo stormed into the room carrying an AR-10 rifle taken off the body of a dead insurgent, demanding to know why Cummings had supplied guns to his enemies.

Interarms was later acquired by the High Standard Manufacturing Company.

In popular culture

Samuel Cummings and Interarms appear as relevant subjects in the well known 1974 Italian movie While There's War There's Hope ("Finché c'è guerra c'è speranza") starring and directed by Alberto Sordi. Cummings also appears in Anthony Sampson's 1991 two-part BBC2 documentary about the arms trade, The Two Edged Sword, interviewed at Interarms' Manchester warehouse.

On the history podcast This Guy Sucked, historians Claire E. Aubin and Drew McKevitt suggested that Cummings was at least partially responsible for getting Americans hooked on gun ownership, leading to its crises of mass shootings and violence.

In academia Interarms is covered by the 2023 book Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America published by University of North Carolina Press.