Says She and Her Husband Are Praying
RIFLE, Colo. — For years, Downtown Rifle’s restaurant scene was furnished with one of the only places in the U.S. you could order a cheeseburger from a server packing a 9mm pistol on her hip. The establishment — Shooters Grill — was the brainchild of now-U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.
The restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, known for pistol-toting servers and a 2017 diarrhea outbreak, shut down on Sunday, according to multiple reports. Huff Post
“We were like a family,” she said. “I would say Shooters, for any employee, was their life. We lived and breathed it every single day. They were a part of this culture and brand that we created in Rifle, and there was a lot of pride with that.”
In June, Boebert was told by new landlord Milken Enterprises that her lease wasn’t going to be renewed. Boebert said the letter came as a shock. She soon called the landlord but “there wasn’t really much wiggle room or anywhere to compromise unless we bought the building ourselves.”
“Within the next two hours, I had reporters reaching out to me asking me if this was true and if we were being evicted,” she said. “I said, ‘Well, we’re not being evicted. The lease is not being renewed — that’s a big difference.’”
Sounds Like an Eviction, Property Manager Felt He Had a ‘Moral’ Imperative to Close the Business
“She didn’t explain exactly why her business was being kicked out,” the website reported. “A person familiar with the arrangement said the property manager felt he had a ‘moral’ imperative to close the business, and had planned to lease the space to another restaurant.”
Not All Employees Were Packing Heat
Some of those waitresses, however, were too young to carry—and a rare few chose not to, one former worker told The Daily Beast. One of them appears to have been on probation for a year in which she worked at the restaurant, and would have been prohibited from carrying a firearm.
This former employee said that, unlike some other servers, she wouldn’t pack a loaded gun at work, and soon stopped carrying altogether.
“I was tired of getting maple syrup on my Glock, running my gun into the corner of the bartop,” she explained.
