How YouTube is changing American gun culture

Joseph Osse loaded his black sedan with a few guns, a steel target and a recording stand for his phone before driving into the desert west of Salt Lake City on a cold day in mid-November.

Osse, 32, began filming himself target shooting around a year ago for short videos he posted on YouTube. He has made over 300, with offbeat titles like “Plinking Steel,” “Art of the Mag Dump” and “First Person Rifle Cam,” that draw several hundred to several thousand views each.

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.

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 The content has garnered more than 29 billion views on YouTube, according to unpublished data from researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.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.

And guns aren’t guitars. Their growing presence on YouTube has attracted some controversy, primarily over the content of the videos and who should be able to watch it.

President Donald Trump’s would-be assassin in July was wearing a popular guntube channel T-shirt when he was killed by a Secret Service sniper. Before murdering 10 people in a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022, Payton S. Gendron said on social media that he watched tactical firearm-related training videos on YouTube.

In March, a New York state judge ruled that Google (YouTube’s parent company) and Reddit would face lawsuits for enabling Gendron’s racially charged killing spree. In June, under pressure from Everytown, a gun safety advocacy group, YouTube announced that it would restrict certain firearm content for viewers younger than 18 and ban videos that demonstrate modifications and features on particular firearms. To navigate YouTube’s restrictions and bans, some big-name guntubers have migrated to their own gun-related streaming service.

Osse, who immigrated from Haiti in the early 1990s, was raised by a single father who worked as a U.S. Air Force mechanic. Like many millennials, Osse got into firearms through video games and bought his first gun — a Glock pistol — during the coronavirus pandemic. He works a minimum wage data entry job and scrapes money from side gigs to support a hobby he said was about learning to shoot, defending yourself and teaching others.

“I’m not in it for the money right now, so I’m just enjoying sharing content with the world and seeing positive reviews, negative reviews too,” Osse said.

One of the channels Osse watched as he learned to shoot in 2022 was T. Rex Arms, a guntube icon and a portal for knowledge on guns, gear, training and the “citizen defense industry” as stated on its website.

Roughly a decade old, the channel started with its main star and founder, Lucas Botkin, shooting targets and making pistol holsters with thermoplastic sheets in a toaster oven. Now the channel has more than 1 million subscribers, a weekly podcast, a downloadable training app and a tactical gear business with around 90 employees.

Isaac Botkin, Lucas Botkin’s brother and the host of the “T. Rex Talk” podcast, traces guntube’s origin to a series of tactical training DVDs released in 2008, at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and just months after the video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released.

“Video games became realistic, we were at war as a nation, and this content was available on DVDs, and you could find it on the internet,” Isaac Botkin said. “Practical training stopped being secret knowledge and it started being widely accessible.”

For guntuber Chris Charles, video games were a gateway from digital shooting to shouldering a real rifle.

“Call of Duty 4, that was huge,” said Charles, 26, who lives in the Atlanta suburb of Stockbridge, where he works as a car emissions inspector and studies digital media at Mercer University. “That’s what brought all the guns, all the attachments, and that’s what changed everything.”

Charles started shooting as a serious hobby after his brother gave him the upper receiver of an AR-15 when he was 17. YouTube videos helped him assemble the rifle, and when his mother died a few years later, shooting edged out his other hobbies — playing piano and football, and rock climbing — as a way to cope with her death.

Charles started his own channel, Kit, Guns, & Gear, about a year ago, and it has attracted a modest following. To Charles, shooting is strictly a hobby, separate from the anti-government and Second Amendment messaging that some prominent guntube channels parrot because it drives engagement. Though of course, he says, “some of that stuff creeps in.”

Just a few days before the presidential election in November, Charles, accompanied by 10 friends, including one woman, most in their 20s and 30s, competed in a pistol competition at a shooting club that was recorded for his channel.

Mark Leeber, one of the range officers, has been shooting since the 1990s and attributed the makeup of their group to a “huge cultural change.” He said YouTube had made the sport more accessible. The most significant development, he added, was the changing demographics.

“A lot more African Americans are getting into it,” Leeber said, adding that Black women too were showing up at the range more frequently. “They’re taking a different level of interest at all age groups. It’s an interesting dynamic because you know when I started, it was a bunch of white guys or middle-aged white guys.”

Many guntube channels are run by men, but one — Tacticool Girlfriend with more than 62,000 followers — is run by a transgender woman who conceals her identity because she’s wary of being stalked. In a video last fall, she called guntube a “very toxic place” that is “filled with machismo and all sorts of bigotry,” a nod to the communal gatekeeping that transcends gender and pits the merits of military against civilian backgrounds when it comes to shooting knowledge.

“But I really want to see more people doing this work because it is very important and I’ve seen the effects I’ve had on numerous people and numerous communities,” she added, referring to the benefits of firearms education, especially among those groups not typically seen at shooting ranges.

The 2009 sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare drew Tim Stuckey, a steel mill worker, into shooting and eventually to his own channel, Gear And Guns, that he started in 2022. It has grown to more than 9,000 followers.

“Then it just went from like Nerf guns to BB guns, and then I got more interested in what my dad had, which was his shotgun,” said Stuckey, 24.

Stuckey’s channel includes content such as how to piece together an AR-15 or pick the right scope mount. In October, he received his first payout of $219.23 for his videos. For Stuckey, who is religious and hoping to become a police officer, gun ownership and the Second Amendment are rooted in “life preservation.” He makes videos to help other gun owners learn from his mistakes, he said.

Stuckey’s growing popularity seems to point to a broader trend: Civilians are finding space in a community once dominated by people with military and law enforcement pedigrees.

At their ranch-style home on the outskirts of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Grace Stuckey, an intensive care unit nurse, said her relationship with firearms was different from her husband’s. She wasn’t raised around guns. Despite being exposed to gun violence as a nurse, she slowly grew appreciative of the hobby as Tim Stuckey poured much of his free time into shooting and creating content for his followers.

“I mean, you have the ability to kill somebody, so that kind of is the back of mind too,” said Grace Stuckey, sitting in the living room as the couple’s pet rabbit, Schmoogs, padded across the floor. “But I think the thing about it is, he’s helping people. Like yesterday, he showed me his little comments that he gets on Facebook, and he’s like, ‘I’m actually helping someone right now.’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.