One of the elections that gun owners should be paying attention to as returns start coming in on Tuesday evening is the race for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. This open seat was held by Republican Scott Tipton for the past decade, but Tipton was tipped out of his chair during the GOP primary when he was unseated by Lauren Boebert, the owner of Shooter’s Grill in Rifle, Colorado.

Boebert’s a staunch Second Amendment supporter, and the sprawling 3rd district, which stretches across the western half of the state, is home to plenty of conservatives who love their right to keep and bear arms. On paper, Boebert should win handily tomorrow night, but anti-gun Democrats have been pouring a steady stream of campaign cash into the coffers of their chosen candidate Diane Mitsch Bush, a former state legislator and a reliable backer of the Biden/Harris anti-gun agenda.

In addition to the influx of campaign cash, the national media’s also taken an interest in Boebert’s campaign, including a recent trip to Rifle, Colorado by New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who decided to brave the wilds of the Western Slope and investigate the deplorable Trumpers that could send Boebert to Congress on Tuesday.

Everyone I spoke to in Rifle agreed that the election would not go smoothly. Tamara Degler, the owner of the Crescent Moon Spiritual Goods store and a former nurse, told me, “Protests? Violence? Yes, for certain.” She called Trump “a high-vibration person sent to guide us through this time.”

It’s Trump, of course, who has done everything he can to stir doubt and violence around the election. He will not go easily. But in the world of Rifle, it’s Black Lives Matter pillagers who have created this America pregnant with tumult.

As I was talking to the Halls, one of those gun-holstered waitresses approached me to say she had spoken to Boebert, who did not want me interviewing people in her restaurant. I stepped outside and carried on the conversation there.

When I went back to my table, she approached me again to say Boebert wanted me out of the restaurant. Period. On what grounds? “She just wants you out.”

So much for “freedom,” Boebert’s slogan on her campaign posters. So much for freedom of expression and the freedom to talk to people who think differently. So much for the freedom of the press and that free American “spirit.”

That’s what freedom may look like in a second Trump term: more the my-way-or-the-highway muzzle of a Glock than the liberty enshrined by the Constitution and the rule of law.

And this is what the media has mostly looked like during Trump’s first term: sanctimonious pundits who jet into middle America as if it was a foreign land. If Boebert had a “no guns allowed” sign, Cohen would have been cheering, but because she apparently didn’t want a New York Times columnist bothering her customers, the columnist imagines an attack on the freedom of the press and the American spirit.

This is the type of nonsense that the national media’s thrown at Boebert, but I expect that when the dust settles and the votes have been counted, Colorado’s newest congresswoman is going to be backing the Second Amendment in Washington, D.C., not backing Joe Biden’s gun ban.