The GOP’s Hot New Christmas Trend Is Photos of Their Kids With Guns
Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert has joined what’s apparently becoming this Christmas’s hottest Republican trend: celebrating with a picture of family members armed as if the “war on Christmas” is an actual siege.
Boebert posed with her children a week after a Michigan 15-year-old who received a handgun as a Christmas present allegedly murdered four people and injured several others at his school.
Boebert, who’d expressed support for fellow House GOP Rep. Thomas Massie after he was heavily criticized for a similar picture, posted a photo of her and her four sons on Tuesday. All except Boebert are holding guns.
“The Boeberts have your six, @RepThomasMassie!” Boebert tweeted, adding, “(No spare ammo for you, though)”.
Boebert tweeted out her holiday photo on the same day of the funeral for 16-year-old Tate Myre, who was killed in the massacre at Oxford High School near Detroit last week. The 15-year-old who allegedly shot and killed Myre, 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin, 14-year-old Hana St. Juliana, and 17-year-old Justin Shilling has been charged with four counts of murder as well as several counts of attempted murder and terrorism.
The alleged shooter’s parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, have been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Boebert—who owns a restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, called Shooters Grill, where most of the staff open carry— is seemingly leaning into every culture war front she can find. On at least two occasions, in September and November, she told constituents similar but slightly different stories about an alleged encounter she had with Rep. Ilhan Omar, a former refugee from Somalia who became one of the first Muslim women to ever serve in Congress. The stories end with Boebert implying Omar is a terrorist.
After tweeting an apology on Nov. 26 to “anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment about Rep. Omar,” Boebert spoke with Omar on the phone last week. But Omar hung up on Boebert after the Colorado Republican refused to make a public apology and then, in Boebert’s telling, she demanded that Omar apologize “to the American people for her anti-American, antisemitic, anti-police rhetoric.”
Boebert then made a video about the call, describing ending a phone call with someone you no longer want to talk to as “part of cancel culture 101.”
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a close ally of Omar in the House, is expected to introduce a House resolution Wednesday to strip Boebert of her committee assignments over her comments about Omar, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat who has called for Boebert to be censured over her Omar comments, mocked the gun photo early Wednesday.
“Tell me again where Christ said, ‘use the commemoration of my birth to flex violent weapons for personal political gain’?” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “[L]ol @ all the years Republicans spent on cultural hysteria of society ‘erasing Christmas and its meaning’ when they’re doing that fine all on their own.”
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Paul Blest, Khareem Sudlow
