GunTube's Taxpayer Subsidies

What do your taxes, a for-profit college, and YouTube gun influencers have to do with each other? We found out.

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GunTube’s Taxpayer Subsidies 

A Guns Down America Investigation 

Late last year, on the popular YouTube channel Angry Cops, host Richard Hy discussed the news of the Syrian government’s recent downfall in a mocking Arab accent with a keffiyeh wrapped around his head.

A person wearing a head scarfDescription automatically generated
A still from a recent video by Angry Cops, sponsored by the Sonoran Desert Institute

“The only thing falling faster than the Middle East countries are my prices,” Hy, who is white, said in character as the proprietor of Makhmud’s Military Menagerie.  

In a small way, your tax dollars helped make that video possible. 

Staying in character, Hy read an advertisement for the Sonoran Desert Institute, a for-profit college in Arizona. 

SDI offers degrees in gunsmithing over the internet to a student body that is heavily subsidized by the federal government. The school has just over 4,000 students, and more than 3,400 of them receive GI Bill benefits, according to the Department of Education and Department of Veterans Affairs. 

Most of SDI’s students are U.S. military members, whose tuition is reimbursed by the Defense Department, or veterans or their spouses or children, whose tuition is covered by taxpayers through the Post-9/11 GI Bill. SDI claimed more than $22 million from the GI Bill or DOD tuition reimbursements in the 2022-23 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics

The school also receives tens of millions of dollars annually through the Department of Education’s Title IV programs, which include federally backed student loans. For the 2022-23 reporting period, Title IV provided more than $13 million for SDI, according to the Department of Education, out of more than $34 million in total revenue. 

Gun Tube Sponsorships

SDI has long sponsored popular Gun Tubers, including Brandon Herrera (3.8 million subscribers), Iraqveteran8888 (2.75 million), Hickok45 (7.91 million), and Honest Outlaw (1.44 million). Influencers with large followings can command high prices from advertisers. According to Bloomberg, successful Gun Tubers can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from ads and sponsorships. 

The largest gun-focused accounts also share a common marketing representative, the Leviathan Group, which “has helped to standardize prices for sponsored videos and maintain relationships between creators and firearm industry contacts,” Bloomberg reported. SDI is among the partners listed on Leviathan’s home page, alongside firearms accessory makers and more mainstream brands like Nord VPN and SimpliSafe Home Security. 

SDI doesn’t disclose how much it pays influencers to market its products, but anecdotal reports suggest the sum is substantial. 

“SDI is one of the highest-paying sponsors on the docket,” one of the two hosts on the gun-focused channel Desk Pop said in an August video

However, the Desk Pop hosts said they turned down SDI’s sponsorship offer based on its poor reputation among former students. One of the hosts discussed his own brief experience as an SDI student, saying the online approach to gunsmithing instruction was ineffective because students could not get “hands-on” experience. 

Negative reviews of SDI abound online, but they are mostly anonymous posts on Reddit or other message boards. But at least one student went public with his story. 

Former student: “I don’t think … any accreditor who has actually taken a class at Sonoran Desert Institute would have approved the school.”

In March 2024, the Department of Education was in the third day of a series of hearings to discuss possible changes to DOE’s accreditation requirements for post-secondary institutions. 

Army veteran Matthew Cardwell told the DOE panel that he felt “duty bound” to warn other vets about his experience as a student at SDI. 

“While I searched for a new school, I came across Sonoran Desert Institute, which was entirely online. After reviewing the website, it looked to me like it had a lot of students who were veterans. And at the time, it seemed like a perfect fit,” Cardwell said, according to a transcript of the DOE Office of Postsecondary Education Negotiated Rulemaking Program Integrity and Institutional Quality hearing on March 6.

SDI’s “instruction … entirely consisted of YouTube videos that I could have watched for free on my own,” Caldwell said. 

Caldwell said he left after a few months, dissatisfied with his experience. 

“It seemed to me like the program was mostly low-level gun maintenance, and certainly not the kind of smithing that I would need in order to get a job once I completed the program. So after only a handful of months, I left the school,” he said.

“In my opinion, I don’t think anyone, any accreditor who has actually taken a class at Sonoran Desert Institute, would have approved the school,” Caldwell concluded.

SDI has been accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission since 2004, most recently renewed in 2023 for five years. SDI president Traci Lee has been a member of DECA’s board of directors since 2019.

SDI’s “instruction … entirely consisted of YouTube videos that I could have watched for free on my own,” Caldwell said. 

Welcomed by the Gun Industry

Despite the undercurrent of criticism from gun owners, SDI appears to remain a welcome presence within the industry at large. In the past year, SDI has attended or announced plans to attend the industry’s largest annual gatherings: NSSF’s Shot Show in Las Vegas, Gun Owners of America’s Goals Event in Knoxville, and the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Dallas.

SDI also touts its work with firearms manufacturer Daniel Defense on an employee firearms training program. 

Daniel Defense partnered with SDI to develop an online training program to relieve its employees from having to travel to dealerships to conduct in-person trainings. The approach saved Daniel Defense $30,000 in annual travel costs, according to SDI. 

Federal Funding and the 90/10 Test

Since SDI began accepting Title IV funds in 2016, it has accepted more than $48 million through the program, making up an increasing share of its revenue each year. 

Sonoran Desert Institute's Title IV Funding, 2016-2022

That sum provides only a partial picture of SDI’s federal support, thanks to a loophole in federal law that the Department of Education has just recently been able to close. 

In an effort to protect students from getting ripped off, the federal government required universities to demonstrate that at least 10% of their revenue came from sources other than the federal government, known as the 90/10 rule. However, until 2023 military scholarships were not counted toward the federal contribution. That meant that schools with a large share of GI Bill enrollees could in theory be almost entirely reliant on taxpayer subsidies to fund their operations. 

In 2021, Congress closed the 90/10 loophole as part of the American Rescue Plan Act, and the Department of Education’s new rules closing the loophole took effect in 2023. 

SDI received $21.6 million through the GI Bill in 2023, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Department of Education will not release Title IV numbers for 2023 until this summer, so we won’t know until then whether SDI passed the 90/10 test. But if their overall revenue and Title IV share increase at the same rate they have been, it may be close. 

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