On May 24, 2022, a Border Patrol Tactical Unit fatally shot 18-year-old Salvador Ramos inside a classroom in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, 77 minutes after Ramos had entered the building to commit the third-deadliest school shooting in American history. Ramos, a former student at Robb, had purchased two high-powered rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition just days before he killed 19 students and two teachers. In the aftermath, several victims’ families pushed for gun control at the state level. Their efforts failed in Austin, but they won the support of Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales, who voted for the first federal gun-control legislation enacted in two decades.
Now, four long years later, those families and the rest of their southwest Texas city of 15,000 may soon be represented in the U.S. House by a gunmaker, Second Amendment absolutist, and edgy YouTube personality by the name of Brandon Herrera. A man who has discussed, on camera, the relative merits of mass killers using the sort of rifle deployed in Uvalde rather than other weaponry; spread memes associated with an extremist movement; and rationalized or made light of lethal violence against people with certain political beliefs.
Also known as the “AK Guy”—a reference to his penchant for the Avtomat Kalashnikova (AK) rifle platform—the bearded 30-year-old is a celebrity in an online gun culture that has emerged on platforms including YouTube, where “gunfluencers” like him have amassed millions of followers through firearm reviews, meme roundups, gun-history content, and Second Amendment commentary. A relative newcomer to politics, Herrera first ran for office in the 2024 GOP primary against Gonzales, citing the latter’s vote for modest gun control as inspiration, while Herrera himself has said he’d oppose any new firearms restrictions, including red flag laws. He cast Gonzales then as an out-of-touch, too-moderate incumbent and forced him into a runoff, which Gonzales narrowly won.
