'I Think It's Awesome!' Here's Donald Trump Jr. in a Promo Video for a Gun Silencer

In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, various news organizations and commentators have noted that Congress, egged on by the NRA, has actually recently been considering weakening gun-control laws, including those covering gun silencers. As NBC News' Alex Seitz-Wald reports, The day House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., was shot in June during a congressional baseball practice, his colleagues were supposed to hold a hearing on a bill to make it easier for Americans to buy gun silencers. That hearing was postponed because of the shooting. The Vegas mass shooting seems likely to further delay consideration of that bill, but meanwhile all the discussion about silencers has drawn fresh attention to Donald Trump Jr.'s relationship with SilencerCo, a West Valley City, Utah-based maker of silencers. MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd has been playing excerpts from a promotional video titled "SilencerCo One on One: Donald Trump Jr." that the company uploaded to YouTube last Sept. 26, when Trump Jr.'s father was still just a presidential candidate. (The video went little noticed at the time, and as of this writing still has fewer than 80,000 views.) Gideon Resnick and Andrew Desiderio of The Daily Beast also cite the video in a post headlined "How Donald Trump Jr. Helped Push the Now Highly Controversial Gun Silencer Bill." The most eyebrow-raising portion of the video is when Trump Jr. mentions "little kids": It's about safety. It's about hearing protection. It's a health issue, frankly, uh, for me. Uh, you know? Getting little, you know, little kids into the game? You know, it greatly reduces recoil. I mean, it's a, it's a great—it's just a great instrument. There's nothing, you know, there's nothing bad about it at all. It makes—it makes total sense, it's where we should be going. As The Daily Beast's Resnick and Desiderio report, SilencerCo CEO Josh Waldon and his wife Audrey "contributed a combined $50,000 to the Trump Victory fund, and each gave $2,700 to Trump's campaign directly." Watch the full video at the top of this post.

'I Think It's Awesome!' Here's Donald Trump Jr. in a Promo Video for a Gun Silencer

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