Despite significant politicization and heated public debates in some major exporting countries, we lack systematic research on mass public preferences on arms trade. Combining political economy models of weapon export decisions with the literatures on trade preferences and foreign policy attitudes, we propose that preferences of citizens over arms trade policy depend on economic incentives, security risk perceptions and moral considerations. Foreign policy attitudes should structure, which of these effects have most weight in the calculus of respondents. We also test for the existence of trade-offs between moral and economic considerations of arms deals, and explore the economic threshold at which arms deals become acceptable, and the moral threshold at which they become unacceptable from the perspective of the mass public. In order to derive the often implicit weighting of different issue dimensionsIn order to derive the often implicit weighting between these different features, we draw on a population-representative survey with embedded conjoint and vignette experiments (N = approx. 6600), fielded in December 2020 in Germany and France, two of the global top-5 exporting countries of major arms. Our research contributes to understanding citizen preference formation in foreign policy in general, focusing on the role of moral vs. economic reasoning therein, as well as understanding citizen preferences in an important but understudied policy field, where citizens likely hold strong opinions, although decision making is oftentimes removed from their eyes.