While Colorado representative-elect Lauren Boebert is getting a lot of attention for her vow to carry her concealed handgun in the U.S. Capitol building, she’s not the only Second Amendment stalwart in the GOP’s freshman class of lawmakers. Andrew Clyde will represent Georgia’s 9th Congressional District in the next session of Congress, becoming the only gun store owner on Capitol Hill one of the few gun store owners in Congress, joining North Carolina’s Ted Budd, who was elected in 2016.

Representative-elect Clyde joins me for a one-on-one conversation on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co to talk about what made him decide to run for Congress as well as what he hopes to accomplish once he’s officially sworn in.

Clyde says it wasn’t an easy decision to throw his hat into the ring; in fact he was the last Republican to enter the GOP primary after Rep. Doug Collins announced that he would be giving up his seat to run for U.S. Senate. Still, Clyde’s outspoken embrace of the right to keep and bear arms helped to propel him to victory in both the Republican primary and the general election, where he absolutely obliterated Democrat Devin Pandy. Clyde brought in nearly 79% of the vote in the 9th District, garnering more than 290,000 votes while holding Pandy to fewer than 80,000.

One of the big reasons why Clyde decided to run in the first place was his own history of dealing with the heavy hand of government. The gun store owner battled the IRS for several years after the agency seized 900,000 from Clyde’s business under civil asset forfeiture laws, and Clyde was ultimately not only successful in getting his money returned to him; he testified in Congress about the abuses and helped spur on the passage of the Clyde-Hirsch-Sowers RESPECT Act.

That bill, co-sponsored on a bipartisan basis by Doug Collins and the late John Lewis, sailed through Congress and was signed into law by President Donald Trump in July of 2019. The law is designed to prevent the IRS from using civil asset forfeiture laws to go after money earned by legal businesses like Clyde’s, and the representative-elect says the experience of testifying in support of the bill and watching the legislative process unfold was a driving factor in his decision to run when Collins’ seat became available.

Be sure to check out the entire conversation with Rep.-elect Andrew Clyde in the video window above, which includes discussion about Clyde’s plans to carry his own firearm in the U.S. Capitol, as well as his thoughts on the biggest threats that are likely to come from a Biden/Harris administration (Clyde, it should be noted, says that he’s still hopeful Donald Trump will prevail in his legal challenges seeking to overturn election results in four states).