One of the more stalwart gun rights advocates in the United States Senate has been Sen. Ted Cruz.

To say this hasn’t gone over well with the anti-gun jihadists in Texas following Uvalde is a bit of an understatement. They don’t like Cruz and they’re desperate to unseat him.

Of course, their last attempt didn’t exactly go over well, but someone else thinks they’re up for the challenge of taking the title.

Texas Democratic state Sen. Roland Gutierrez announced his 2024 U.S. Senate bid Monday, vying to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

The state senator represents a wide-ranging district that includes San Antonio and the city of Uvalde, where he has advocated against gun violence since the Robb Elementary School shooting last year.

A nearly four-minute video announcing his candidacy focused on the aftermath of the shooting and featured multiple family members of victims.

Since the massacre, which left 19 students and two teachers dead and prompted widespread calls for greater gun control laws, Gutierrez has introduced multiple pieces of legislation to increase accountability and prevent future mass shootings. In February, he introduced a bill aimed at avoiding communication breakdowns by ensuring multi-agency radio infrastructure is in place in certain counties he represents.

“What happened in Uvalde wasn’t just about guns, it was about neglect — the neglect of rural Texas, the neglect of the systems in this state that are supposed to keep us safe. That failure hasn’t been isolated,” Gutierrez says in the video before listing perceived Republican failures across a range of issues.

So basically, Gutierrez is trying to run primarily on gun control, but he figures he has to run on more than just that because, well, it’s Texas.

The problem is that while Texas was most definitely rattled by Uvalde, most Texans aren’t anti-gunners. They’re not interested in such measures and, even if they were, that wouldn’t be the driving force that sends them to the polls.

He handily beat Beto O’Rourke in 2018 despite O’Rourke being the Democrats’ golden boy–so much so it prompted him to run for president, even in defeat. Gutierrez doesn’t have that kind of support, at least not at this point.

So he can run against Cruz, but he’s going to get stomped in the dirt, and yeah, gun control is likely to hurt him.

Cruz’s latest approval rate is at 45 percent, which is just two percent lower than it was when he won re-election back in 2018.

Frankly, I think Gutierrez’s attempt at the Senate is a quixotic quest, to say the least.

Of course, it’s still early and there’s no guarantee that Gutierrez will be the nominee for the Democrats. It could be someone else who’s even more of an anti-gun zealot than Gutierrez is, which will just make it that much easier for Cruz.

Next November holds a lot of mysteries at this point, but the Texas race is going to be an important one. If Cruz holds, and I think it will, it’ll be because gun control groups once again broke their teeth trying to turn the state blue.