Return of The American Arsenal

The starting point for this work was a January 2026 conversation with members of Shopify’s enterprise team. The discussion was not framed around policy enforcement or regulatory fear. It was framed around the future shape of American commerce and the kinds of companies that should define the Shopify platform at its highest levels. The names on the table were not speculative startups or lifestyle brands. They were companies like Leupold Optics, EOTech, and Daniel Defense, manufacturers whose products are used by U.S. special operations units, federal agencies, law enforcement organizations, allied militaries, and millions of American civilians who participate in one of the country’s oldest and most durable consumer markets.

The timing of the conversation was not accidental. Shopify today maintains formal partnerships with companies like Anduril and Palantir, firms that sit at the center of a new venture-backed industrial complex focused on intelligence, sensing, autonomy, and national security. 

The boundaries between defense technology, advanced manufacturing, and civilian commerce are collapsing. A generation of venture firms now exists that explicitly invests in mechanized lethality, detection systems, security platforms, and the logistics and software layers that support them. In that environment, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that the commerce infrastructure serving premium athletic apparel, beauty brands, and consumer electronics should somehow exclude the industrial and consumer manufacturers that support the country’s security ecosystem.

To understand why this moment matters, it is necessary to revisit Shopify’s complicated relationship with the firearms industry. 

In 2018, Shopify updated its Acceptable Use Policy, significantly restricting the sale of firearms and certain related components on its platform. The company was responding to a broader reckoning that all major internet platforms were experiencing at the time. They were discovering that simply deferring to local law was no longer sufficient as a governance model. Payment processors, cloud providers, marketplaces, and social platforms were all being forced to confront the reality that the scale of the internet made them de facto regulators of commerce and speech. Shopify’s move was not ideological so much as structural. It reflected the growing recognition that platform risk was no longer an abstract concern.

The effect on the firearms industry was severe. Many manufacturers and retailers who had built their entire digital businesses on Shopify were forced to migrate their infrastructure or shut down online sales altogether. Others remained but were pushed into increasingly fragile configurations involving third-party payment processors and custom compliance workflows. For several years, the category operated in a kind of technological exile, forced to assemble commerce stacks from components never designed to work together under heavy regulatory pressure.

What changed over the next several years was not Shopify’s philosophy but its maturity. As Shopify Plus evolved into a true enterprise platform, the company began treating high-risk and highly regulated verticals differently. The approach became more deliberate, more technical, and more case-driven. Serious manufacturers with meaningful compliance frameworks, defensible governance, and long-term business models were no longer treated as edge cases. They were treated as enterprise clients. Firearms and defense-adjacent manufacturers began quietly returning to the platform, not because Shopify had abandoned its standards, but because those standards had become sophisticated enough to support them.

This shift reflects a broader transformation in the structure of American commerce. In the United States, the firearms industry is not a marginal cultural phenomenon. It is a constitutional, industrial, and civilian infrastructure that spans defense manufacturing, law enforcement supply chains, sport shooting, hunting, and personal protection. The same country that produces the world’s most advanced weapons systems also contains the largest civilian firearms market in human history. Pretending that this reality can be segmented away from mainstream commerce infrastructure is not a sustainable strategy for any platform that intends to remain dominant.

At the same time, this does not imply that every firearms manufacturer or retailer belongs on Shopify. The opposite is true. The new standard of acceptability is not legality alone. It is operational maturity. It is governance. It is a compliance discipline. It is the ability to function as a serious enterprise under the scrutiny of regulators, payment networks, and platform risk teams. Companies whose products are used by the U.S. military, federal agencies, allied governments, law enforcement, and law-abiding civilian consumers at scale meet that standard. Many smaller or less disciplined operators do not, and they should not.

Today, a growing list of manufacturers should be evaluated for a Shopify Plus partnership, if they have not yet begun the process. While EOTech has migrated and Leupold Optics is well on its way, the larger list includes: Nightforce, Steiner, Vortex, Trijicon, and Holosun. It includes firearms manufacturers like Daniel Defense, Staccato, Q, LWRC International, Primary Weapons Systems, Noveske, Syndicus USA, and Sons of Liberty Gun Works. It includes ammunition and ballistics leaders such as Hornady, Federal Premium, Black Hills, and Barnes. It also includes accessories and tactical systems companies like SureFire, Magpul, BCM, Crye Precision, Ferro Concepts, Spiritus Systems, Haley Strategic, Safariland, Ops-Core, and Team Wendy. This list isn't exhaustive but it is representative of the market that would be better served on Shopify. 

This is not hobby commerce. It is industrial commerce operating at national scale.

The limiting factor for this sector has never been consumer demand, that's alive and well. It will always be. But the correct infrastructure has not always been available to deserving merchants. As a result: payment fragmentation, compliance complexity, platform risk, legacy ERP systems, brittle fulfillment operations, and digital experiences that collapse under regulatory weight have hindered serious companies from scaling. MTN Haus exists to solve precisely those problems. We build Shopify ecosystems that respect federal and state compliance requirements, integrate firearms-friendly payment networks, and maintain the customer experience standards expected of modern enterprise brands. We do not offer templates. We build durable commercial systems for companies that intend to exist for decades.

The American industrial economy is reorganizing itself around a fusion of software, manufacturing, defense, autonomy, logistics, and commerce. Shopify is already embedded in that transformation. The question for manufacturers is whether they are ready to participate in it at the level that the next decade will require. 

When they are, MTN Haus is positioned to guide that transition.