Brandon "The AK Guy" Herrera, the Republican candidate for the open congressional seat in TX-23, squared off against his Democrat opponent in a televised debate on Tuesday night.
Interestingly, Herrera didn't directly mention the Second Amendment in his opening statement, choosing instead to focus on border security, lowering taxes, and ensuring that parents have the final say in how their children are raised.
Stout, on the other hand, brought up Herrera's prolific online gun-related content in the first few seconds of her opening statement, accusing him of going to "Robb Elementary three months after the tragedy that occurred there" and firing "a gun at child-shaped targets."
Uvalde, Texas and Robb Elementary are in the heart of TX-23, and there's no doubt that gun control (and the Second Amendment) are a big issue in the district. Stout, though, appears to have been wildly off-base in asserting that Herrera went to Robb Elementary and shot at child-shaped targets there.
Stout appears to have been alluding to a 2022 video from Australian vlogger I Did a Thing, who made a video featuring a robotic dog with an K&K MP5 on its back. The vlogger, whose real name is Alex Apollonov, was apparently mocking the idea of armed school staff as a deterrent to active shooters, and had brought along cutouts of cartoon kids, with the idea that the dog would avoid them while hitting the targets identified as the threats.
Herrera helped Apollonov with the design, and the test was apparently run on property that Herrera owns near Uvalde, but Stout made it sound like Herrera showed up at the elementary school, set up some kid-shaped targets, and started blasting away, which definitely didn't happen.
The shooting at Robb Elementary came up later in the debate as well. Herrera said in order to prevent shootings like that from happening again we have to understand why the school was targeted in the first place. Herrera pointed out that the elementary school was a soft target, and suggested that having armed school staff is one way of ensuring that kids are protected on campus.
In her response, Stout brought up the fact that there were numerous police officers who arrived at the elementary school within minutes, yet did not engage the shooter for nearly an hour. That's not the same thing as having a dedicated armed presence on campus, though, and research from the Homeland Security Institute has indicated that having both school resource officers and armed staff is the most effective way to stop a school shooter.
Stout would prefer to raise the age to purchase so-called assault weapons from 18 to 21, as well as make investments in mental health. Stout claims to have talked with local gun owners who've told her that raising the age wouldn't impact their business, but she said nothing about the constitutional concerns of depriving young adults access to their Second Amendment rights.
In rebuttal, Herrera brought up the armed citizens who stopped the attack at a Utah In-n-Out restaurant, as well as the young man who stopped the shooter at Greenwood Mall in Indiana a couple of years ago. Herrera also brought up Stout's claim about him shooting at Robb Elementary and called it a "complete fabrication" before demanding an apology.
Stout rather gleefully said she was sorry and acknowledged that the video was filmed in Uvalde County months after the shooting at Robb Elementary before demanding an apology of her own for some of Herrera's claims on the campaign trail.
She then pivoted back to the shooting at Robb Elementary and claimed that stopping a shooting at a mall is somehow different than stopping a shooting on campus.
"Students and teachers need protection and they need real policies that are going to do that, not rhetoric," she said.
Would raising the age to purchase a centerfire semi-automatic rifle actually protect students and teachers? I don't think so. Shootings like the one at Columbine High School happened in the midst of a ban on so-called assault weapons, and according to the Secret Service handguns are actually used in more school shootings than rifles of any kind. A hardware ban isn't going to stop someone intent on committing mass murder, and in my opinion Stout would have been better off detailing her proposal for more investments in mental health.
Surprisingly, that was the extent of Second Amendment topics during the debate. Stout tried to call out Herrera for some of his more controversial videos, and Herrera largely declined to engage her. Instead, during his closing arguments he lamented that Stout had spent so much time on salacious headlines about him instead of discussing real issues impacting the voters of TX-23.
I thought Herrera acquitted himself well, and I don't think Stout's attacks on his online content made much of an impact, since his opponents have been trying to make that an issue since the Republican primary in 2024. The conventional wisdom is that Herrera is favored to win TX-23 on Election Day, and I didn't see anything in Tuesday's debate that should change that.
