Halloween is traditionally a time for costumes, candy, haunted houses, and trick-or-treating. But for the gun industry, the holiday also presents another opportunity to market firearms, ammunition, and accessories on social media. This year, gun manufacturers and retailers embraced the spooky season with advertisements for assault weapons, silencers, and handguns featuring jack-o’-lanterns, ghosts, and other familiar Halloween imagery.
Some companies incorporated their products into traditions particularly popular among children, displaying guns alongside candy and trick-or-treat buckets — despite the fact that guns have been the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S. since 2020. Other companies leaned into the holiday’s horror themes, using haunted houses and movie serial killers to advertise sales promotions.
The social media posts are a snapshot of the gun industry’s current sales priorities — especially in light of the Trump administration’s gun policy rollbacks — and another example of how the industry uses holidays and pop culture to promote deadly weapons and make them seem like harmless, everyday items.
Silencers Dominate Halloween
On October 9, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) made the unprecedented decision to no longer enforce the National Firearms Act (NFA), a 92-year-old federal law placing strict application and registration requirements on dangerous items like silencers, or sound suppressors — a move the gun industry was quick to celebrate. So it should come as no surprise that several gun manufacturers incorporated assault weapons equipped with silencers into their Halloween-themed social media posts.
For example, Heckler & Koch, a German gun manufacturer with an American subsidiary in Columbus, Georgia, posted an AI-generated video on Instagram of a skeleton in a graveyard retrieving an MP5 assault weapon with a silencer and other tactical accessories from the ground and walking off with it.
Barrett Firearms, which produces AR-style assault weapons as well as .50-caliber sniper rifles powerful enough to down helicopters and disable vehicles engines, posted an image on Instagram of an AR-10 configured for sniping with a scope and silencer floating in front of a haunted house. The company captioned the image “Ghost Ops.”
EOTech, a firearm optics manufacturer that began selling silencers last year, celebrated Halloween with an AI-generated video of a haunted house with flickering lights, blood spatters, and a floating AR-15 with a silencer installed. The imagery is particularly gruesome and tone deaf considering the number of people killed in mass shootings involving AR-15s.
More examples of social media posts from silencer manufacturers and retailers are shown below. While the industry markets silencers as hearing protection aids for hunters and recreational shooters, a Smoking Gun analysis found that they have been used in over 100 violent incidents, including mass shootings, and planned attacks since they were first invented.
Haunting Displays of Firepower
In May 2025, the Trump administration settled three lawsuits involving Rare Breed Triggers, effectively legalizing forced-reset triggers (FRTs) that allow AR-15s to fire like machine guns. Since then, Rare Breed has debuted new FRTs for other assault weapons, including MP5s, and called one of its designs a “treat” on Halloween.
Atrius Development Group, a company that produces its own FRT-like devices for AR-15s, made the truly bizarre choice to post a video of Mike Myers, the serial killer from the Halloween franchise, firing dozens of rounds at pumpkins with a single trigger pull. The caption warns viewers to “[s]tay safe out there this weekend.”
One Horse, an Indiana-based gun manufacturer founded by a former Anderson Manufacturing executive, posted an AI-generated image of a ghost wearing a tactical helmet and goggles and brandishing a suppressed AR-15. In June, the company became the first to sell AR-15s “factory-built” with Atrius’ rapid-fire devices already installed.
Using Fear to Sell Guns
Gun makers regularly use fear to sell guns in ads and social media posts, and this Halloween was no different. In a series of Instagram posts, Henry Repeating Arms depicted its guns as the only protection against “otherworldly” monsters.
Similarly, Sons of Liberty Gun Works showed two suppressed AR-15s for “defending yourself against the boogeyman.”
Trick-or-Treating with Guns
Other companies drew inspiration from one of Halloween’s most recognizable traditions: trick-or-treating. Several gun companies incorporated candy, costumes, and plastic jack-o’-lantern buckets into their social media promotions, co-opting the holiday and downplaying the inherent risks of firearms. For example, gun maker Rost Martin simply posted a photo of a 9mm pistol on top of a pile of candy with the caption “[l]eave the candy for the trick or treaters. We know the RM1CX Comp is what you really want.”
Ammunition manufacturer Hornady took a similar approach, placing boxes of rifle ammunition within a pile of candy, yet urging Instagram followers to “have a safe and fun night!”
More examples from Halloween 2026 are below. To learn more about the gun industry’s toxic marketing tactics, click here.
