District seen as potentially decisive in battle for House control
Brandon Herrera, the 30-year-old YouTuber known as “The AK Guy,” is the frontrunner to represent Texas’s 23rd congressional district in November’s midterm elections, according to The Guardian. The sprawling, majority-Latino border district runs from the outskirts of El Paso — where a white nationalist killed 23 people at a Walmart in August 2019 — to Uvalde, where an 18-year-old former student killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in May 2022. The Guardian reported that the race 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.
The seat has been in Republican hands since 2015, and Democrats are hoping that such an extreme candidate, even by Texas’s standards, could be vulnerable at the ballot box. In August, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Texas 23 to its target list, a step The Guardian described as a shift from previous assumptions that the district was irredeemably Republican. Should he win, Herrera would take what he calls his “second amendment absolutism” to Washington, becoming the voice in Congress for the outskirts of El Paso, the city left devastated by the 2019 Walmart mass shooting, and for Uvalde, the site of the 2022 Robb Elementary massacre. He has campaigned as a Trump-endorsed “America First” Republican, promising the district’s more than half a million voters that he will impose no new taxes, double down on the border crackdown and oppose government funding for abortion.
Herrera has built his following on extreme pro-gun commentary. Three days after the August 3, 2019, El Paso massacre — in which a white nationalist armed with a semi-automatic firearm unloaded about 90 rounds, killing 23 people and injuring 22 more — he posted a video warning viewers that what they were about to hear might sound “a little harsh,” while assuring them it was “data driven” and came from “a place of empathy.” “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,” he said, adding that had the perpetrator used a truck or a fertiliser bomb, the death toll might have been much higher, and citing an average victim count of 15 in mass shootings and the 168 killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Shannon Watts, founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action, said of the argument: “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’s entry into politics came after the Uvalde shooting. The massacre at Robb Elementary lasted 77 minutes, the gunman 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, The Guardian reported. The shooter, an 18-year-old former student, had legally bought two AR-style rifles with 30-round magazines just days after his 18th birthday. In the aftermath, President 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, said Uvalde “jolted Congress into passing its first major piece of gun safety legislation in a quarter of a century.”
Herrera grew up in a military family in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and dropped out of college to build a firearms manufacturing business focused on the growing market for semi-automatic rifles. He spent years developing his own spin on the Soviet Kalashnikov rifle, the AK-47, scaling it up to take 0.50-caliber cartridges — ammunition developed for Browning heavy machine guns more than a century ago — and marketed the result, the AK-50, through his company, The AK Guy Inc. Citing frustrations with statewide Covid restrictions, he relocated the company to San Antonio, Texas, in 2020. The Guardian reported that it was guns — and specifically the Uvalde school shooting — that brought him into politics. Furious that Republican Representative Tony Gonzales, who represented Uvalde, had backed the 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 lost that challenge narrowly and was repeating the effort this April when Gonzales abruptly resigned from Congress in a sex scandal, clearing the way for Herrera to claim the Republican nomination.
Herrera 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 and introducing red-flag laws that allow courts to temporarily remove firearms from people who pose a threat to themselves or others. He has argued that the way to protect children is to hire more armed security officers and turn schools into “hard targets,” and he wants what he calls “concealed carry reciprocity” — an arrangement that would override regulations in states that take a more stringent approach to gun safety. Watts described the end result: “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.”
Both the age measure and red-flag laws 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, said: “Just like we can never turn around and see our daughters again, we’re not going to turn around and walk away.”
The state’s shift toward expansive gun laws has unfolded over decades. Until the 1990s, Texas was relatively restrictive in its gun laws, according to Ruben. In 1995, then-Governor George W. Bush signed a law allowing licensed Texans to carry concealed handguns in public, saying it would make Texas a “safer place.” After the El Paso massacre, Republican lawmakers introduced permitless carry, and Governor Greg Abbott signed it into law in June 2021, allowing anyone to pack a concealed, loaded handgun in public without a licence or training; The Guardian reported that the measure was the polar opposite of the gun safety measures Republican lawmakers had promised immediately after the massacre. Abbott did not refer to the El Paso shooting when he signed the law, instead presenting 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.”
Texas has more than 1 million gun licenses — twice as many as the next state, Florida — with about half of all households in possession of at least one weapon. “Texas has largely tracked the broader effort of the gun rights movement to relax policies on firearms,” Ruben said. Texans are not universally wedded to firearms supremacy, however: 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, and that clear majorities want firmer background checks, a ban on all AR-15-style rifles, and red flag laws.
Herrera’s recorded past has drawn objections from within Texas conservative circles. In a 2022 video viewed 2.3 million times, he called 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. Jewish Insider reported that it uncovered private videos produced by a younger Herrera in North Carolina for the Fayetteville chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that has promoted the “Lost Cause” narrative which reframes the civil war as a struggle over states’ rights rather than slavery. Herrera described the group as an “historical honor society dedicated to preserving confederate heritage,” without mentioning its longstanding links with white supremacist groups, and the newspaper reported that his involvement with neo-Confederacy activity continued until at least 2019.
Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist based in Austin, said 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. Herrera responded on social media: “When did conservatives become pearl clutching virtue signalers?”
Herrera has also turned his platform on critics. In January 2023, he posted a video on X addressing Watts directly, unloading a stream of obscene invective and using 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, adding: “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 she was unsurprised, 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,” she said.
On the Unsubscribe podcast, Herrera 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, and in 2025 more than 28,000 people in the wider US population died by firearm suicide. Herrera 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, and was later acquitted of homicide. Days after the Kenosha incident, Herrera said in a video: “Good luck, kid. You minted some good commies,” adding that he was not encouraging anybody to go “get themselves into some shit … it’s not worth it.” The two have campaigned together and fired a machine gun in unison out of a helicopter.
The Guardian compared Herrera’s ascent and its impact on the gun discourse to what Donald Trump has done to the Republican establishment, writing that Herrera and other “guntubers” have filled the void left by the National Rifle Association, which has been badly weakened by financial scandals and internal disputes. Into that vacuum, The Guardian reported, have stepped even harder-line gun rights groups and social media influencers who are “louder, more brazen and pushing at the boundaries of a second-amendment free-for-all.” The Guardian said it repeatedly asked the Herrera campaign whether the candidate would explain his policy stance in an interview and received no reply, and that detailed questions about his past comments and current positions also went unanswered. Herrera recently agreed to talk to the New York Times, dismissing criticism of the base language he uses in videos and social media posts by presenting it as a “comedy performance.”
Public polling of the race has been sparse and partisan. A survey back in March, carried out by the House Majority PAC sponsored by the Democratic party, put Herrera’s Democratic rival, Katy Padilla Stout, two points up. A poll conducted last month by the Remington Research Group, on behalf of the rightwing website Breitbart, put Herrera ahead by six points.
Padilla Stout, who grew up within the district’s hunting and ranching culture — her father bought a ranch shortly before she was born, “it was part of his American dream” — said Herrera’s most egregious outbursts were a turn-off for many voters. “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. She acknowledged the challenge of addressing Herrera’s language on the campaign trail: “As a mother myself, that’s a hard thing for me to put on thousands of doors.” The Guardian reported that she has not made Herrera’s gun rights policy front and centre of her campaign — voters, she said, rarely raise it — and that her first campaign ad focused on the cost of childcare and groceries and the prolonged drag of the Iran war. “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,” she said.