They Shoot Fudds, Don’t They?
When Tim Walz, the straight-shooting governor of Minnesota, was selected as Kamala Harris’s running mate, much was made of his rural bona fides, including his enthusiasm for firearms and hunting. In story after story and across social media, photos of the governor posing on a clay sporting course and hunting for pheasants appeared, burnishing his image as a traditional gun owner—and crack shot at that. “Look, I know guns. I’m a veteran. I’m a hunter. I was a better shot than most Republicans in Congress, and I have the trophies to prove it,” he said in his acceptance speech at the DNC in August. “But I’m also a dad. I believe in the Second Amendment, but I also believe that our first responsibility is to keep our kids safe.” In the online gun community that congregates on platforms like YouTube and Instagram, there is a name for this kind of gun owner: a Fudd.
Taking its name from the Looney Tunes character Elmer Fudd, the shotgun-wielding, hard-luck hunter always chasing after Bugs Bunny, a Fudd is an old-timey, plaid-clad marksman, one who does not, according to Urban Dictionary, “truly believe in the true premise of the second amendment” and as such is near-universally despised among the gun-loving fanatics of Reddit. (See “3 Signs You’re A Fudd” and “Top 10 Ways To Annoy Your Local Range Fudd.”)
And truth be told, Walz is about as close to a textbook definition of Fudd as you could imagine: not only does he look almost exactly like the Looney Tunes character (as pointed out by a Trump campaign Twitter account) and the popular Fudd Wojak meme, he uses a Beretta A400 Xcel Sporting shotgun for hunting, wears a lot of plaid, and supports gun control measures, including a ban on assault weapons, all of which is classic Fuddery.
In August, the right-leaning YouTuber Geary Gundersen released a video titled “Tim Walz: Anatomy of a Fudd.” Days later, Firearms News published an essay full of the most extreme right-wing talking points on Walz under the headline, “Ultimate Fudd Walz Represents Worst of ‘Enemies Inside the Gates.’” As the author, a self-declared “grassroots armed citizen advocate,” argues, Walz is a danger to real gun enthusiasts: “The strategy is clear. He’s avuncular and folksy. A big old Teddy bear. He’s a flyover moderate. Trump and MAGA and NRA are extremists. Disregard that he’ll act the part of iron-fisted Marxist presiding over a monopoly of violence if given the chance.” And after Walz opened up the pheasant season in his home state, the NRA cut the resulting video into a mocking ad comparing him to a poodle.
The majority of gun owners may be Fudds to some degree, but they could not be further from the center of gravity of American gun culture, which is increasingly online and skews younger, led by content creators and influencers. The world is often broadly referred to as GunTube—a play on YouTube, the site where many of these creators post videos in which they test how deadly a new rifle cartridge is, recreate viral shootings, and offer tutorials on “Gunfighting for Dummies.” In short, think full battledress, human dummies made from ballistic gel, and brand partnerships with night vision device purveyors (“Women love it when you sneak up on them!”). These videos rarely discuss target shooting or hunting; they are directed at a new generation of gun owners and are focused on “real world” scenarios like urban warfare.
Two of the most popular and demonstrative GunTuber channels are Garand Thumb and Demolition Ranch, which have 4.1 and 11.8 million subscribers respectively. Garand Thumb is fronted by U.S. Air Force veteran Mike Jones, who films himself reviewing rifles like the U.S. Army’s New Mk18, testing out various execution methods, and hosting IDF veterans of the war in Gaza in order to teach his viewers about urban warfare tactics. In late July, Jones—who usually appears in full battle rattle—staged a recreation of the first assassination attempt on President Trump to debunk a number of myths. By comparison, Demolition Ranch videos have more of a comedic tilt, with channel host Matt Carriker testing to see if Legos are bulletproof or attempting to cook food with a hot rifle barrel, often with help from a supporting cast of friends. Wearing baseball hats, tees, and jeans, they strike a decidedly less aggressive posture than Jones, even as they poke fun at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or attempt to skirt YouTube’s rules around firearm content, which prohibit full-auto weapons, homemade firearms, and other accessories, as well directions on how to remove safety features. (When Thomas Matthew Crooks took aim at Trump, he was wearing one of Demolition Ranch’s T-shirts.)
The mixture of edgy internet memes and general anti-government, but pro-military, posture that characterize broad swaths of this culture can come across as incoherent but, on the whole, it tilts to the right. The more politically engaged creators include the likes of Brandon Herrera and Lucas Botkin of T. Rex Arms. Herrera has a long track record of producing videos for his 3.6 million subscribers joking about Nazi Germany and glorifying Rhodesian light infantry. In January, he won “Most Influential Male of the Year” at the fifth-annual Gundies, an award show for gun influencers. As he put in his acceptance speech, “It’s been really a humbling experience to go from someone who just made really fucked-up jokes on the internet to someone who continued to make fucked-up jokes on the internet.” Herrara then ran in the Republican primary for the congressional seat that represents Uvalde, Texas, on a right-wing platform calling for arming teachers in schools and opposing “any new firearms restrictions.” In the event, he forced the incumbent into a runoff before losing by four hundred votes. Botkin, meanwhile, is an unabashed Christian nationalist who pushes a heady mixture of right-wing grievance politics to his 1.6 million subscribers. After Botkin successfully lobbied the government of Tennessee to repeal a tax on ammunition in 2019, he created a “How to Pass Pro-2A Legislation” video to encourage his viewers to become politically active in their own communities.
Of course, all of this is possible because of social media—and like influencers in any other industry, a lot of money is being made, though just how much is hard to nail down. But with millions of views, monetized YouTube videos, direct advertising in videos, and sometimes not-so-clear marketing partnerships, it is sure to be significant for those at the top of the pile. Many of the top GunTubers share the same talent representative, Leviathan LLC, which helps market their channels to brands looking for product placement and advertising partnerships with like-minded companies.
This trigger-happy posturing is demonstrative of a marked shift in gun culture over the past forty years, which has jettisoned the image of the American gun owner as a responsible sportsman and embraced gun ownership as a totalizing belief system. That is, guns are no longer seen as a tool for hunting or even self-defense but as inextricable from their owner’s self-identity, and any push to regulate firearms is refigured as a direct assault on who they are. This change has tracked with the transformation of the National Rifle Association from an organization concerned with gun safety and marksmanship to a political advocacy group solely focused on defending the right of its members to carry, unbothered, military-grade assault weapons in public. But now, with the NRA in tatters, hollowed out by controversy and litigation, a brigade of influencers have stepped into the breach, peddling their own versions of Second Amendment absolutism, stoking fear of societal breakdown, and encouraging viewers to prepare for armed encounters with other Americans.
A key turning point was the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the conservative majority ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms for purposes such as self-defense, unconnected to a “well-regulated militia.” More than just the social media impressions, the research bears this out. Over the past two decades, assault-style rifles (decidedly anti-Fudd) have grown to comprise around 25 percent of guns manufactured in the United States, with one in five gun owners reporting that they have at least one assault-style rifle. One cannot disconnect pop culture and media from what types of guns are popular as well. The youngest gun owners grew up playing first- and third-person shooter video games that focused on military and vigilante combat like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. Gun owners thus itch to own versions of the same weapons. GunTubers have underlined this connection with videos shot in the style of first-person shooters, as well as by reviewing guns found in video games and movies.
Aimee Huff and Michelle Barnhart, both professors at Oregon State University, have studied how guns in the United States are marketed and broken gun ownership into three distinct groups: recreational, self-defense, and what they call “2A” gun owners. Huff and Barnhart describe the “2A” subculture as ideological, guided by the fervently held belief that the Second Amendment is foundational to all other rights. “Gun ownership is understood as a hallmark of individual freedom and liberty, and as a necessary means for an individual to embrace and convey specific values,” the pair wrote in 2023, “including patriotism, populism, limited government, support for military and law enforcement, and settler colonialism.” The study found that advertising for sporting rifles and shotguns, which appeal to the recreational group, has decreased year after year, while ads for assault-style rifles and pistols have increased—and markedly so.
The domestic gun market certainly isn’t cooling off. Covid-19 saw gun sales in the United States surge and leading that marked uptick were eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds, who made up a third of total gun sales during the pandemic. Young people are buying guns, and many of them are already online and engaged. Their idea of gun ownership is shaped by the culture’s tastemakers on social media, who emphasize the connection between guns and masculinity, and advise on prepping for apocalyptic scenarios and armed conflict, casting their viewers as future combatants. As guns, and specifically the AR-15, have become nearly wholly right-coded, it is easy to see how Democrats have an outdated idea about what American gun culture looks like.
Huff and Barnhart tease out a distinction between this new gun culture and the archetypes of the sportsman and self-defender. These older and waning cultures are “inherently oriented to specific consumer practices and products.” By comparison, the gun owner model promulgated by GunTubers is “oriented to a system of beliefs and values, such that consumers wishing to engage with the 2A subculture must rely on influential market actors to prescribe specific consumer practices and products” that in turn “enable members to translate their belief system into specific ways of consuming.” GunTube is not just selling guns but an entire identity.
The results of this more militarized and oppositional gun culture are already being seen. As mentioned, Thomas Matthew Crooks, the shooter who attempted to assassinate Trump in July, was apparently a fan of the Demolition Ranch YouTube channel, so much so that he bought a $30 shirt from their online store and wore it on the day he took a shot at the former president. More concerning is how GunTuber videos lay out how-to’s and weapon reviews that can be used by would-be shooters. The gunman in the 2022 shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, that left ten dead cited YouTube videos—and specifically Garand Thumb—as training aids that helped him buy the right equipment, train, and plan the mass shooting. He even went as far as to namecheck Garand Thumb in his manifesto, which was posted right before the shooting. Of course, this kind of information is out there regardless of which GunTuber makes a video on “How to Survive a Gunfight”—one of the Garand Thumb videos watched by the Buffalo shooter. But what GunTubers do is combine this information with right-wing talking points about Democrats who want to seize every gun in the land, by force if necessary.
Walz, the responsible gun owner, was supposed to help counter this delusion. His full-throated support for increased gun control was meant to come across as a serious and thought-out decision, not just some kind of knee-jerk liberal stance. He was, after all, touted by Guns & Ammo as one of its top twenty lawmakers in 2016, a time when he still held an A rating from the NRA—though he’s since been downgraded to an F.
But any perusal of Fudd commentary online will show you immediately that this is precisely the opposite of where the online gun community is at. To them, Fudds are worse than your typical knee-jerk assault weapon ban supporting liberals because they are “traitors.” A Fudd believes that by “sacrificing the interests of other firearm owners, they will be able to safeguard their own,” according to a 2017 blog post by Gideon Joubert, a South African gun rights activist. While the terminally online gun enthusiasts lurking in the comment sections of Garand Thumb’s latest how-to may still be in the minority—and there have been some indications that liberals are buying more guns—there is no sign the growth of their ranks is slowing. The aging Fudd, with his walnut stock shotgun and 30-06 rifle, is simply outgunned.