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

The influencer called "The AK Guy" is an unorthodox match for a district where one of the nation's worst mass shootings occurred. GOP voters might pick him anyway.

SAN ANTONIO — Brandon Herrera is a 28-year-old YouTube gun influencer with more than 3.4 million subscribers and half a billion views. In one 17-minute video, Herrera, in a tight black T-shirt and backward baseball cap, reenacts the killing of President John F. Kennedy Jr. using a replica head that contains a condom’s worth of fake blood.

“That just feels real icky,” Herrera says in the video after blood spatters everywhere.

Herrera, aka The AK Guy, who manufactures guns as well as shoots them online, is also running in a primary Tuesday that could knock out a sitting member of Congress in a district that only two years ago saw a horrific mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Herrera has almost 500 videos on his YouTube channel, with titles ranging from “Testing the Gun That Killed Abraham Lincoln” to “SUPER CURSED GUN IMAGES,” “HORRIBLY CURSED GUN IMAGES” and “LITERALLY CURSED GUN IMAGES.” In a 2022 video that has almost 2 million views, Herrera tests out a submachine gun from Nazi Germany and goose steps to a marching song commonly associated with Nazi soldiers. (Herrera, who seems to be doing this all for the lolz, tells viewers if they don’t see anything wrong with a song about “a soldier missing a pretty girl at home,” they should “go ahead and hit that subscribe button.”)

And on Monday, Herrera, in jeans and wearing brown western boots, stepped out of a white Dodge Challenger with Oregon plates and strode into the Thirsty Horse Saloon, a bar in northern San Antonio, for a midday rally to kick off early voting.