And I kind of braced myself when I saw the New York Times did a piece about "guntube" recent.

See, a lot of the guys I enjoy watching, like Herrera and Administrative Results, have a quirky sense of humor that many people might well find offensive. Demolition Ranch made national news when the first would-be Trump assassin was wearing one of his shirts. Kentucky Ballistics likes to use big-bore stuff against targets that tend to explode. There are a lot of ways such an article by the New York Times could go sideways.

Well, first, most of those guys don't get mentioned. Demolition Ranch gets referenced, but not by name, and it was because of the shirt, Herrera's run for Congress was referenced as well, but for the most part, this was...not what I expected. (Archived link)

Firearms content on YouTube has long been relatively niche, an algorithmic recommendation that can appear after viewers watch a Call of Duty video-game stream or search for information about the slick guns used by John Wick, the popular movie hit man.

Mr. Osse, who posts under the name Graizen Brann, learned how to shoot by watching the YouTube channels he is now trying to emulate. In the past, firearms education was often bestowed by older family members, and picked up in youth groups or by joining the military.

“I enjoyed what I was doing,” he said. “And maybe if there was anyone else on the planet that felt pretty much the same way I did about firearms that they would go ahead and subscribe and just see what happens.”

A new generation of American gun owners who are younger, more racially diverse and drawn to tactical training and self-defense are regularly watching firearms channels. The content has garnered more than 29 billion views on YouTube, according to unpublished data from researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. It has made for a growing subculture commonly referred to as guntube, with creators known as guntubers.

“It has this gigantic audience that until recently we haven’t tried to understand,” said Jared Holt, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that researches technology’s impact on political and social issues.

To some, the videos that review firearms, test gear and offer training tips resemble a hobby that could just as well be cycling or guitar playing.

But guntube is its own sprawling community. Some guntubers have cult followings, and there is an industry awards event known as the Gundies, a riff on the Dundies from the sitcom “The Office.” The firearms industry sponsors content creators — who help sell guns and countless accessories — and much like video game streamers, some guntube stars make thousands of dollars per video. One even ran for political office.

There are three channels referenced, two of which sit around 2,000 subscribers, one with 9,000 followers, and one with 63,000 subscribers run by a transgender woman--and happens to also be the only place there were negative comments made about guntube, with "Tacticool Girlfriend" referring to the space as "a very toxic place" filled with "bigotry"--which is probably going to be good for most of those channels in the long run, especially because of what this report wasn't.

It wasn't a hit piece. The author, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, wrote a while back about his own "complicated" history with gun ownership. The former Marine infantryman owns an AR-15 but writes for the New York Times. That's a strange dichotomy all on its own. However, in that piece, he claimed he wanted to address the innate skepticism many of us feel toward the Times and their reporting on gun ownership.

Well, this isn't the most awful way to do so.

The truth is that guntubers are a key aspect of gun culture in this day and age. The first brush many younger people have with firearm ownership is via YouTube, particularly some of these channels that look at weapons they might have encountered in Call of Duty or some similar game. Then they see Brandon Herrera shooting an M249 or Kentuck Ballistics shooting a Barrett and they start watching. Before long, they learn that they can own a lot of these guns themselves, so they start looking into gun ownership.

And that strengthens support for the Second Amendment in the long run.

Then that spins into people looking at other gun-related content on YouTube, such as Cam & Company. 

Which may be why Google tries to screw over guntubers at every opportunity, but that's the game, unfortunately.