Lauren Boebert

The Boeberts also owned a restaurant called Smokehouse 1776 (now defunct), across the street from Shooters Grill.

Lauren Opal Boebert (born December 19, 1986) is an American politician, businesswoman, and gun rights activist serving as the U.S. representative for CO's 3rd congressional district since 2021.

Boebert was born in Altamonte Springs, Florida, on December 19, 1986 to Shawna Roberts Bentz, who was 18 at the time of Boebert's birth.

The identity of her father is not known.

Professional wrestler Stan Lane was suspected of being Boebert's father, but two DNA tests ruled that out.

At the age of four, Bentz took her from Florida to Colorado to stay with her boyfriend, only to move back to Florida with a different boyfriend, and then finally return back to Colorado with the Colorado man, who became her step father.

Records at the Colorado secretary of state's office show that her mother was registered to vote in Colorado as a Republican from 2001 to 2013 and as a Democrat from 2015 to 2020.

When she was 12, she and her family moved to the Montbello neighborhood of Denver and later to Aurora, Colorado, before settling in Rifle, Colorado, in 2003.

Boebert dropped out of high school during her senior year in 2004 when she had a baby; she earned a GED certificate in 2020, a month before her first election primary.

Boebert has stated that her family depended on welfare when she was growing up, and that she was raised in a Democratic household in a liberal area.

At age 19, Boebert herself registered to vote in 2006 as a Democrat; in 2008, she changed her affiliation to Republican.

After marrying Jayson Boebert in 2007, she got a job filing for a natural gas drilling company and then became a pipeliner, a member of a team that builds and maintains pipelines and pumping stations.

According to Boebert, she became religious while attending a church in Glenwood Springs, and that she became a born-again Christian in 2009.

From 2013 to 2022, she owned Shooters Grill, a restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, where staff members were encouraged to carry firearms openly.

A member of the Republican Party, Boebert is known for her gun rights advocacy.

In 2013, Boebert and her husband opened Shooters Grill in Rifle, west of Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

Boebert says she obtained a concealed carry permit after a man was "beaten to death by another man's hands ... outside of [her] restaurant", and began encouraging the restaurant's servers to carry guns openly.

That is mostly false: in 2013, a man who had reportedly engaged in a fight blocks away ran to within about a block of Boebert's restaurant, fell, and died from a methamphetamine overdose.

She has said she volunteered at a local jail for seven years, but attendance logs at the Garfield County Sheriff's office show that she volunteered at the jail nine times between May 2014 and November 2016.

After leaving high school, Boebert took a job as an assistant manager at a McDonald's in Rifle.

She later said that this job changed her views about whether government assistance is necessary.

In 2015, Boebert opened Putters restaurant on Rifle Creek Golf Course, which she sold in December 2016.

In 2017, 80 people who attended a Garfield County fair contracted food poisoning after eating pork sliders from a temporary location set up by Shooters Grill and Smokehouse 1776.

The restaurants did not have the required permits to operate at the temporary location, and the Garfield County health department determined that the outbreak was caused by unsafe food handling at the event.

Shooters Grill, according to her congressional disclosure forms, lost $143,000 in 2019 and $226,000 in 2020.

In the 2020 United States House of Representatives elections in Colorado she unexpectedly defeated incumbent Scott Tipton in the primary election and went on to win the general election over Democratic nominee Diane Mitsch Bush, a former state representative.

In Congress, Boebert has associated herself with the conservative Republican Study Committee, the right-wing Freedom Caucus, of which she became the communications chair in January 2022, and the pro-gun Second Amendment Caucus.

She won reelection in 2022 by a narrow margin of 546 votes against former Aspen City Council member Adam Frisch.

Boebert's views are broadly considered far-right.

She is an ally and supporter of former president Donald Trump and supports Trump's claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and voted to overturn its results during the Electoral College vote count.

She has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, has "celebrated attacks on the free press", and some academic and journalistic sources have investigated her ties to far-right extremism.

She opposes transitioning to green energy, COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates, abortion, sex education, gender-affirming surgery for minors, and same-sex marriage.

She advocates an isolationist foreign policy, but supports closer ties with Israel for religious reasons.

A self-described born-again Christian, Boebert has said that she is "tired of this separation of church and state junk" and argued for greater church power and influence in government decision-making.

In 2020 Boebert protested orders issued by Colorado Governor Jared Polis to close businesses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In mid-May 2020, she violated the state's stay-at-home order by reopening Shooters Grill for dine-in service, for which she received a cease and desist order from Garfield County, with which she refused to comply.

The next day, Boebert moved tables outside, onto the sidewalk, and in parking spaces.

The following day, Garfield County suspended her food license.

By late May, with the state allowing restaurants to reopen at 50% capacity, the county dropped its temporary restraining order.

Shooters Grill closed in July 2022, when the building's new owner opted not to renew the lease.