There is a restaurant called Shooters Grill in the small town of Rifle, Colorado. You can eat there what you can eat in many American restaurants: steaks, hamburgers, sandwiches. The special thing about the Shooters Grill is, and the name suggests, that the staff walk around with their revolvers and pistols belted on.
This idea came from the owner of the restaurant, Lauren Boebert. On the one hand, this has to do with local color. As the owner of a restaurant in the Colorado countryside, Lauren Boebert is practically something of a saloon host in the Wild West. On the other hand, Boebert carries her own weapon – mostly a nine-millimeter pistol from the Austrian company Glock – because she is a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, the second amendment to the US constitution. This guarantees all Americans the right to own weapons.
None of this would be remarkable if Boebert had not been a member of the US House of Representatives in Washington for the Republicans since the beginning of the year. Gun laws are much stricter in the capital than in Rifle, Colorado. Carrying a pistol openly on your belt is forbidden, which Boebert does not want to see. She spent the first few days in office telling her colleagues, her new neighbors and any journalist who wanted to know that she would of course continue to wear her Glock. The new MP has been on television so often that she has become something like the face and voice of the Republican faction.
In this regard, Boebert is a little reminiscent of the Democratic MP Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who rose to become a political star within a few weeks after her first election victory in 2018. And indeed there are similarities. Both women are relatively young – Boebert is 34, Ocasio-Cortez is 31 – one is as conservative as the other is left-wing liberal, both communicate very naturally and effectively via social media. And both are not in Congress because they defeated a candidate from the other party, but rather politically more moderate party friends. Like Ocasio-Cortez two years ago, Boebert beat the owner of her current seat, a Republican, in the party primary last summer. She accused him of not being right enough. The victory in the main election was then more of a formality, as both politicians represent safe constituencies that reliably vote for the Republicans and the Democrats respectively.
But that’s where the similarities end. Because while Ocasio-Cortez has a decidedly left-wing, but very serious and detailed political program, Boebert has so far only attracted attention with her demand to be able to carry her pistol with her everywhere and at all times.
That, in turn, reflects the poor programmatic state of the Republicans quite well. In the past four years, the party’s parliamentarians have given their nod to what President Donald Trump has given. That was then packaged in patriotic-sounding phrases, such as the supposedly God-given and unrestricted right to own weapons.
So it was no surprise that Boebert, an enthusiastic Trumpist, voted against the confirmation of Joe Biden’s election victory on January 6. “Today is 1776,” she tweeted on the morning of that tragic day – a reference to the American Revolution. It didn’t look so good a few hours later, after the Trump mob stormed the Capitol. But Lauren Boebert has so far shown no regrets. When the House of Representatives met for its first session after the storm, she demonstratively walked around the metal detector. In her pocket, she says, she had her Glock with her.
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