The video begins with Brandon Herrera staring intently into the camera. He is filming himself in a hotel room seated between twin beds, his black hair slicked back and beard neatly trimmed. He is wearing a T-shirt branded with his trademark nickname, “The AK Guy”, above the image of a semi-automatic rifle primed for action.
Three days earlier, on 3 August 2019, a white nationalist armed with a semi-automatic firearm not dissimilar to the one stamped across Herrera’s chest entered a busy Walmart store in the Texas border city of El Paso and opened fire.
Within minutes the shooter had unloaded about 90 rounds, killing 23 people and injuring 22 more.
With the massacre still dominating headlines, most public figures were limiting themselves to vanilla expressions of “thoughts and prayers”. Not so Herrera.
He opened his video with a warning: what viewers were about to hear might sound “a little harsh”. But, he assured them, it was “data driven” and came from “a place of empathy”.
Then he said: “With these terrible mass shootings, you should be really glad that some of these people are using guns to do this … I think we are fortunate that these people are using guns.”
Had the perpetrator of the El Paso massacre used a truck, or a fertiliser bomb, the death toll might have been much higher, Herrera opined. He then attempted to back up the argument with statistics: the average victim count in mass shootings is 15; the Oklahoma City bombing killed 168.
Such sophistry could not disguise his core argument, however. With the blood barely dry on the Walmart floor, Herrera was urging his viewers to celebrate the choice of weapon used in the carnage – a military-style AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
Herrera, 30, has made a name for himself producing such extreme out-of-the-box pro-gun statements. It is what launched him as a prominent “gunfluencer” with 4.27m subscribers to his YouTube channel, where his videos have been viewed almost 860m times.
And now, he is the frontrunner in the race to represent the border district of south-west Texas in November’s midterm elections. Texas’s congressional district 23 is being closely watched as potentially decisive in the battle to control the House of Representatives through Donald Trump’s final two years in the White House.
Democrats are hoping that such an extreme candidate, even by Texas’s standards, could be vulnerable at the ballot box. They aim to flip the seat that has been in Republican hands since 2015.
Should he win the midterm election in Texas’s congressional district 23, Herrera will take what he calls his “second amendment absolutism” to Washington, with possible ramifications for nationwide gun laws and debate.
Locally, the implications are even more poignant. It would mean that a Republican committed to loosening America’s already lax gun laws would become the voice in Congress for those who live in the outskirts of El Paso, the city left devastated by that 2019 Walmart mass shooting.
More chillingly still, Herrera would also represent the town of Uvalde where, in May 2022, an 18-year-old former student killed 19 children and two teachers.
Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action, has been a target of Herrera’s aggressive use of social media. Should he win, she says, there could be long-lasting consequences.
“His idea that somehow we should be grateful that firearms are being used in mass killings is a very cynical ploy to numb people to gun violence, to make them expect it and even accept it. The more Brandon Herreras we elect to Congress, the more likely that will be our destiny.”
***
Herrera has been presenting himself on the campaign trail as a Trump-endorsed “America First” Republican. He has promised the more than half a million voters scattered across the sprawling, majority-Latino district that he will impose no new taxes, double down on the border crackdown and oppose government funding for abortion.
But it was guns – and specifically the Uvalde school shooting – that brought him into politics.
Herrera grew up in a military family in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and dropped out of college to build his own firearms manufacturing business, focusing on the growing market for semi-automatic rifles. He spent years developing his own spin on the Soviet Kalashnikov rifle, the AK-47. He scaled up the weapon so that it was capable of taking huge 0.50-caliber cartridges, ammunition developed for Browning heavy machine guns more than a century ago.
He called his invention the AK-50, and began marketing it through his company, The AK Guy Inc. Citing frustrations with state-wide Covid restrictions, Herrera relocated the company to San Antonio, Texas, in 2020.
Two years later, Uvalde became the site of one of the worst school shootings in American history. The massacre lasted 77 minutes, the shooter killing his victims at close range as police held back for more than an hour before they finally broke into the classroom and killed him.
Riding the ensuing wave of revulsion, Joe Biden signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which strengthened background checks for buyers under 21 and tightened restrictions on firearm possession for some domestic-abuse offenders. Eric Ruben, an expert on gun policy at the SMU Dedman school of law in Dallas, Texas, says that Uvalde “jolted Congress into passing its first major piece of gun safety legislation in a quarter of a century”.
Herrera had a starkly different response. Furious that Tony Gonzales, the Republican congressman representing Uvalde, had backed Biden’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, Herrera decided to challenge him for his seat.
“If you vote against our interests, if you vote against gun rights,” he warned Gonzales in 2024, “we will primary you, and we will take your fucking job.”
He did challenge Gonzales that year, losing to the incumbent narrowly, and was repeating the effort this April when Gonzales abruptly resigned from Congress in a sex scandal.
His departure has cleared the way for Herrera to claim the Republican nomination. He is now free to blast his extreme view of gun rights across Uvalde, across the district, through the state of Texas and, should he be successful, nationwide.
Energised by his vast YouTube following and the large sums it passes his way, Herrera is in a position to weaponise his gun rights absolutism. He has vowed to resolutely oppose any new gun safety laws, including raising the age of ownership of an AR-15-style weapon from 18 to 21 or introducing so-called “red flag” laws that allow courts to temporarily remove firearms from people who pose a threat to themselves or others.
Both measures have been championed by families of Uvalde victims, some of whom have devoted themselves to pushing for stricter gun laws in the hope of preventing other mass shootings.
Veronica Mata, a founder of the gun safety group Lives Robbed who lost her 10-year-old daughter, Tess, in Uvalde, has put it this way: “Just like we can never turn around and see our daughters again, we’re not going to turn around and walk away.”
***
To people outside Texas, and beyond America, one of the state’s enduring mysteries is its fierce loyalty to the most extreme form of gun rights, especially in the wake of such human suffering.
There are more than 1m gun licenses in Texas – twice as much as the next state, Florida – with about half of all households in possession of at least one weapon.
But as Ruben, the law professor, points out, until the 1990s Texas was relatively restrictive in its gun laws. In 1995, George W Bush, then governor, signed a law allowing licensed Texans to carry concealed handguns in public. He said it would make Texas a “safer place”, an argument that meshed well with the state’s culture of rugged individualism.
Herrera’s position echoes that logic: he has argued that the way to protect children is to hire more armed security officers and turn schools into “hard targets”.
Since then, Texas’s policies have taken a pro-gun turn in lock step with the tightening grip of an increasingly hard-right Republican party. “Texas has largely tracked the broader effort of the gun rights movement to relax policies on firearms,” Ruben said.
And yet, Texans are not universally wedded to the idea of firearms supremacy. A 2025 opinion survey by the Hobby school of public affairs at the University of Houston found that 85% of Texans support raising the age of buying an AR-15-style rifle from 18 to 21. The reform is especially relevant to Uvalde, given that the shooter legally bought two AR-style rifles with 30-round magazines just days after his 18th birthday.
The same survey showed a clear majority of Texans wanting firmer background checks on gun buyers, a ban on all AR-15 style rifles, and supporting red flag laws.
After the El Paso mass shooting, Republican lawmakers introduced permitless carry, allowing anyone to pack a concealed, loaded handgun in public without a licence or training. It was the polar opposite of the gun safety measures they had promised immediately after the massacre.
The law was the end result of an intense lobbying campaign from hard-right gun activists. When he signed permitless carry into law in June 2021, the Republican governor Greg Abbott did not refer to the El Paso shooting. Rather, he presented it as a defiant act to stop the federal government taking Texans’ guns, arguing that arming yourself was a form of self-defense “against attacks by others”.
Herrera wants a similar law to be imposed across the country. He wants what he calls “concealed carry reciprocity”. It would override regulations in states that take a more stringent approach to gun safety.
Watts, the Moms Demand Action founder, described the end result Herrera is seeking: “His goal is that if you can carry a gun in Texas, no questions asked, then you should be able to carry that firearm down into the New York City subway.”
***
Shannon Watts had already experienced Herrera’s particular style of political combat first-hand. He unloaded a stream of obscene invective at her on X in January 2023.
Speaking directly to her in a video posted on the platform, he ridiculed the group she had founded. Rather than debate her on gun policy, he opted for vulgar phrases drawn from the pornography industry.
“Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions,” he said. Referring to her role as a mother and an activist, he continued: “The fact that you kept your cum trophy doesn’t make you any less wrong about the dumb shit that you say.”
Watts told the Guardian that she was unsurprised by his virulent attack, as she has been frequently assailed over the years by male gun rights activists.
“It has always been about misogyny. How dare a woman and a mother use her voice. That strikes at the heart of every gun extremist, that women could take away their manhood.”
Herrera’s ascent and its impact on the gun discourse bears comparison to what Trump has done to the Republican establishment. Herrera and other “guntubers” have filled the void left by the self-implosion of the once almost monopolistic National Rifle Association (NRA), the gun rights group that held an iron grip on Republican politicians and used that power to resist public safety measures.
Over the past few years, the NRA has been badly weakened by financial scandals and internal disputes. Into that vacuum has stepped a plethora of even harder-line gun-rights groups and social media influencers: louder, more brazen and pushing at the boundaries of a second-amendment free-for-all.
The Guardian repeatedly asked the Herrera campaign whether the candidate would explain his policy stance in an interview, but received no reply. We followed up with a list of detailed questions about his past comments and current positions, including his reductivist view of a child as a “cum trophy”, but that also went unanswered.
He did agree to talk to the New York Times recently, swatting away criticism of the base language he uses on the videos and in social media posts by presenting it as a “comedy performance”.
Then there’s the company that Herrera keeps. He has been endorsed by Kyle Rittenhouse, the gun rights activist who, then 17, shot dead two men and injured another amid 2020 street protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (He was later acquitted of homicide.)
Days after the Kenosha incident, Herrera had made another of his “jokes” on video – this time about the death of Rittenhouse’s victims.
“Good luck, kid. You minted some good commies,” he said, adding that he was not encouraging anybody to go “get themselves into some shit … it’s not worth it.”
The duo have now campaigned together and fired a machine gun in unison out of a helicopter.
But sometimes, even some of his followers recoil from the “edgy” humour. One of the remarks that has drawn the strongest condemnation came on the Unsubscribe podcast, when he said he often thought about “putting a gun in my mouth, so I’m basically an honorary veteran”.
In 2023, the latest year for which records are available, 4,690 US military veterans died by suicide using a gun. In 2025, more than 28,000 people in the wider US population died by firearm suicide.
Another disturbing “joke” he has made relate to the Nazis and the Holocaust. In a 2022 video viewed 2.3m times, he calls the MP 40, the submachine gun used by the Germans in the second world war, “the original ghetto blaster”. Later in the video, he and an associate goosestep to the sound of Ericka, the military marching song adopted by the Waffen SS.
The Nazi references were not the only evidence of Herrera’s flirtation with far-right historical imagery. The news outlet Jewish Insider uncovered private videos produced by a younger Herrera in North Carolina on behalf of the Fayetteville chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The group has promoted the “Lost Cause” narrative which reframes the civil war as a struggle over states’ rights rather than slavery. Herrera described SCV as an “historical honor society dedicated to preserving confederate heritage”, without mentioning its longstanding links with white supremacist groups. His involvement with neo-Confederacy activity continued until at least 2019, the newspaper reported.
Such an unsettling back catalogue has provoked objections to his candidacy even from within Texas conservative circles. Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist based in Austin, challenged Herrera by saying there should be zero tolerance for making light about Nazi Germany. “I don’t think the Holocaust is something we should be joking about,” he said. “I don’t think we should be singing the song of the stormtroopers.”
Steinhauser told the Guardian that anything perceived as antisemitic was likely to play negatively with Texas Republicans and independent voters, both of whom tend to be strongly pro-Israel.
True to form, Herrera lashed back at Steinhauser, posting on social media: “When did conservatives become pearl clutching virtue signalers?”
***
Could this toxic screed prove to be Herrera’s political undoing?Nationally, the Democratic party has begun to wake up to the possibilities.
In August, the Democratic congressional campaign committee added Texas 23 to its target list, denoting a shift in strategy from previous assumptions that the district was irredeemably Republican.
Opinion polls have been few and far between, and those that have been conducted came from partisan sources. A survey back in March was carried out by the House Majority Pac sponsored by the Democratic party. It put Herrera’s Democratic rival, Katy Padilla Stout, two points up. A poll conducted from the other side of the aisle last month put Herrera ahead by six points. That came from the Remington research group, on behalf of the rightwing website Breitbart.
On the ground, his opponent Padilla Stout sees his most egregious outbursts as a turn-off for many voters, especially his depiction of children in the wake of the Uvalde massacre at Robb elementary school.
“So many children in Uvalde were affected by the shooting. When people hear the way he describes children, their jaws are on the floor,” she said.
And yet, Padilla Stout has a palatability problem. How do you talk about “creampies” and “cum trophies” without offending voters anew?
“As a mother myself, that’s a hard thing for me to put on thousands of doors.”
Texas 23 is a deeply rural and relatively sparsely populated district that has hunting and shooting in its DNA. Padilla Stout herself grew up within that culture.
“My dad bought a ranch shortly before I was born, it was part of his American dream,” she said. “And that aspect of gun culture, the hunting and ranching part, I’ve been part of it all my life. I have cousins who would get their first shotgun on their 12th birthday, that’s our family tradition.”
Given the prevalence of guns in the local way of life, she hasn’t made Herrera’s gun rights policy front and centre of her campaign. Voters, she said, rarely raise it.
Her first campaign ad focused on the cost of childcare and groceries, and the prolonged drag of the Iran war.
But she told the Guardian that she would continue to sound the alarm whenever she is able. “Herrera is a gun manufacturer who makes money off his gun absolutism. That’s his end goal. He wants to remove all boundaries on the second amendment, and dismantle public safety piece by piece.”
