Eric Greitens, who won the Republican nomination for Missouri governor yesterday (Aug. 2), has a resume rich in diverse experience: Navy Seal, Rhodes scholar, White House fellow, international humanitarian. But in a new ad, he appears to have one simple qualification: shooting a Gatling-style machine gun into (or above?) a body of water.
In the ad, the campaign says Greitens is under attack from “Obama’s Democrat machine,” but that he is a “conservative warrior,” who fights back with “big guns.”
This is not Greitens’ first ad of its kind. In June his campaign released a clip of him firing a military-style assault rifle to illustrate his mission of “taking dead aim at politics as usual.”
Quartz asked Greitens’ campaign about how it obtained the weapon, identified as a 7.62 x 51mm caliber “minigun” by attorney and firearms expert Steven Howard, and will update this post with a response.
Greitens won a four-way race for the Republican nomination for Missouri’s governor, and will face the state’s Democratic attorney general Charles Koster in November. According to the Associated Press, Greitens’ campaign sold “ISIS hunting permits” stickers as a fundraising tactic, including some signed by the Navy Seal who says he killed Osama bin Laden.