Don't Believe in the "Second Coming" Business? This Might Change Your Mind.

It's hard to imagine a more natural fit than war and weapons. Hand in glove sort of thing. War is every gun maker's market. They need, you got, you sell and often at a handsome premium.

Okay, you might want to sit down for this.

Germany has a legendary arms maker called Heckler & Koch. When the job requires the finest, the best go for H&K. When US Navy Seals took down Bin Laden they sent Osama to his maker with H&K submachine guns.  The company's majority owner, Andreas Heeschen, describes it as "the Porsche of weapons."

It therefore came as a huge surprise when the company announced a new policy. It will no longer go after the low-hanging fruit. It will no longer sell its weapons in active conflict zones.

First revealed in a yearly financial report in March, the gun manufacturer plans to no longer sell weapons to corrupt and warring governments.

Heckler & Koch promises only to deal with NATO countries, NATO-equivalent nations (Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Switzerland), and countries with passing marks on Transparency International's corruption index and the Economist Intelligence Unit's democracy test.

Bad Boy to Good Boy

The firm will forgo business in major and emerging markets, including Israel, Mexico, Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and every nation on the African continent. The policy shift is a first for any major arms manufacturer, and a significant change for a company with a recent history of sketchy deals.

"This is a company that had one of the most terrible reputations," Grasslin said. "In all the podium discussions I've done in the last few years, the other arms companies used to say, 'We're not like Heckler & Koch, we're morally better'. Now Heckler & Koch has come along and said, 'We're not delivering to the Middle East anymore'. It'll be interesting to see what happens now."

As of 2014, the company enjoyed 11 per cent of the global gun business, according to the Guardian. "If you made a map of where there are no Heckler & Koch guns, you'd have two white patches," Grasslin said. "One: the former Warsaw Pact countries - they're all flooded with Kalashnikovs. Two . . . the Antarctic."