Media Contact: Georgia Seltzer, (202) 822-8200 x104, gseltzer@vpc.org

Gun Owners of America (GOA) held its second annual Gun Owners Advocacy and Leadership Summit (GOALS) on August 9th and 10th in Knoxville, Tennessee. VPC staff traveled to the meeting and attended panels featuring gun industry members and GOA staffers.

In recent years, a top priority for the gun lobby and firearms industry has been to expand the market for firearm silencers as a new profit center. This summer, GOA and its financial partners in the gun industry used the budget reconciliation process — which resulted in passage of the wildly misnamed and Orwellian “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — in an attempt to repeal the National Firearm Act’s (NFA) tax and registration requirements on silencers and short-barreled rifles. They were successful in repealing the tax on silencers, but the registration requirement remained intact.

While GOA continues to fight to completely remove all regulation under the NFA, the gun industry’s marketing of silencers was on full display at the conference’s show of new firearms and accessories.

Silencer manufacturers and their gun-lobby advocates clumsily attempt to portray their marketing efforts solely as a “public health” campaign to protect shooters’ hearing (while at the same time dismissing gun death and injury as a public health issue). As the images below show, the gun industry is prepared to take advantage of the elimination of the tax on silencers and hoped-for repeal of the remaining NFA regulations, with no regard for the real-world impact of the proliferation of silencers and the further militarization of the U.S. gun culture.

The Campaign for Gun Industry Accountability is an ongoing project of the Violence Policy Center.