Brandon Herrera Wants To Go From Shooting Guns On YouTube To Representing Uvalde In Congress

SAN ANTONIO — Brandon Herrera is a 28-year-old YouTube gun influencer with more than out of Congress in decades after a shooter in his district killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school on May 24, 2022. The gun reform law became a watershed moment for Congress, which passed bipartisan legislation to close the “boyfriend loophole” and expand background checks — in large part because of what happened in Uvalde.

But for the people who may send Herrera to Congress, the vote was seen as caving in to Democrats on gun control, which is largely not up for debate, even after a horrific shooting.

“These politicians that came here [after the shooting] were just pushing [gun control] down their throats,” said Donna Williams, the elected clerk of Uvalde County who, as of last weekend, hadn’t decided who she would vote for Tuesday. Williams, who lives on 6 acres just outside of Uvalde, believes the shooting was a product of mental illness and not gun culture.

More than gun rights, though, border security seems to be the biggest factor in this race. The 23rd District is huge and sparsely populated, extending from El Paso to San Antonio along the Mexico border. Voters here bring up the record number of illegal border crossings in the last year and the phenomenon of “bailouts,” when migrants who are on the run from police literally bail from a vehicle and cause dangerous high-speed chases.

“They’ll just run and hide, and sometimes the cops find them and sometimes they don’t,” said a business owner from Hondo, a small city halfway between San Antonio and Uvalde. “Our kids can’t be outside because you never know who’s outside.”

Williams feels safest carrying a gun at all times on her property. “They’re breaking into homes, breaking down fences … other states don’t really see what we’re going through.”

Gonzales, whose campaign advertises his endorsement from the union representing U.S. Border Patrol agents, has stood by his vote against the House Republicans’ border bill, which he argued would close the door to asylum seekers. Gonzales called the bill — spearheaded by another Texan, hard-liner Chip Roy — “un-Christian” and “anti-immigrant” in its approach to securing the border with Mexico.

Herrera, meanwhile, is a Second Amendment absolutist and is clear about where he stands on tactics to secure the border and pare back immigration. He says he’ll “block any spending bills that do not include finishing the wall, returning to the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, and ending the phony asylum claim racket.”

The few people I talked to at Herrera’s event before getting kicked out were generally familiar with the concept of a YouTuber but not Herrera’s content specifically.

Ben Taylor, a 71-year-old retiree, described it as “edgy” and “not always in the best taste” — and it’s easy to see how someone who is 71 wouldn’t necessarily be into a video of Herrera doing a parody of an Eminem song with other “guntubers” because he got kicked off Instagram or shooting an AR-50, which, to most of us, is just a very big gun.

Taylor was nonetheless disappointed with Gonzales and concerned about border security and the strain that an influx of new people will have on natural resources, especially the water supply. “I think it says something that someone my age is going to vote for Brandon over Tony,” he said.

Meanwhile, a 37-year-old voter named Preston, who didn’t want to share his last name, said he likes that Herrera, a Gen Zer, “isn’t fossilized.”

Herrera, ready after two minutes to boot-scoot himself away from our conversation, said it should tell the GOP establishment something that it’s been unable to blunt his momentum.

“It’s not moving the needle the way they want it to, and people are sick of it,” he said, his yellow drink sweating in the midday Texas heat. “Money doesn’t have as much power in politics in the social media age as they would like.”