ICE agents shot and killed a U.S. citizen who was observing their activities in Minneapolis this week. He was legally filming them with his phone, an act which we know from many videos taken there and in cities around the country, inflames the groups of masked, armed federal agents who are roaming the streets randomly rousting anyone who looks at them sideways. Americans are legally entitled to record what is happening in the community at the hands of law enforcement and many of them bravely go out and do it so there will be a record of the savagery that’s been unleashed on our country. They are also legally entitled to carry a concealed weapon in many states, which the Trump administration now says in itself signals an intent to kill government agents, entitling those agents to shoot first and ask questions later.
The nation is still reeling from the events of last weekend but we should have been prepared for it to happen. After all, we had evidence long before the 2024 election that President Donald Trump wants law enforcement to brutalize citizens. All the way back in 1989 when he took out a full page ad entitled “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back the Police” he was agitating for the police to be “unshackled” from the “constant chant of police brutality.” More recently, in his first term the Secretary of Defense Mark Esper testified that he had angrily demanded that the military be deployed on the streets during the George Floyd protests and orders be given to shoot the protesters. Wall St. Journal reporter Michael Bender wrote in his book titled “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” that Trump’s language became increasingly violent as he would show videos of violent confrontations and demand more of it. “That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people,” Trump would say, “Crack their skulls!” After federal agents ambushed an Antifa activist in 2020 (without ever seeing a gun) Trump called it “retribution.”
In the first term, he had people around him who would talk him down and explain that it wasn’t legal or politically wise. Today, he has his top domestic adviser Stephen Miller, his Justice department, Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon all on the same page with him. In the wake of both the murders, the top officials in the administration all jumped before cameras and took to social media to condemn the victims and defend the agents before the bodies were even cold. ( In fact, U.S. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino claimed the true victims of the shooting were the federal agents.)
They essentially say the real victims had it coming and use it as a warning for others to stop exercising their first amendment rights. Interestingly, they also came out of the gate condemning Alex Pretti for exercising his 2nd amendment rights which is generally understood to be sacred on the American right.
Pretti was legally carrying a firearm in a holster in his back waistband. The numerous videos of the event show unequivocally that he never showed it to the CBP officers who approached him on the street as he was filming, nor did he ever even touch it during the encounter. In fact, they didn’t know he had it until they had already sprayed him the face with pepper spray and had him on the ground on his hands and knees as which point one of the agents removed it from the holster and another one then immediately shot him in the back.
After all these years of right wing, gun proliferation activists bringing firearms to protests one would have thought this would be the last thing for which Trump officials would condemn Pretti. They brought guns into state houses to protest COVID restrictions and there were more than a few guns found among the January 6th protesters who President Trump pardoned. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 year old who was too young to legally own the AR-15 he used to shoot three people at a protest in Kenosha Wisconsin in 2020 is a MAGA celebrity, extolled as a great young man who loved his country.
But DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said of Alex Pretti, “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” claiming with no evidence that his intention was clearly to kill law enforcement. FBI director Kash Patel told Fox News, “no one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “I’m sorry he’s dead but he did bring a semi-automatic weapon to what was supposed to be a peaceful protest.” Trump himself told the Wall St. Journal “I don’t like any shooting. I don’t like it. But I don’t like it when somebody goes into a protest and he’s got a very powerful, fully loaded gun with two magazines loaded up with bullets also. That doesn’t play good either.” (For the record, gun enthusiasts say that there is nothing unusual about having the two extra magazines. Holsters like Pretti’s commonly have a slot in which to put them.)
There were others repeating the same talking points, insisting that bringing a gun, legally or not, to a protest (or, apparently, just to the streets to film an ICE raid) meant he should have expected to get shot by federal officers. This flies so hard in the face of the gun rights movement that it should have bounced back and hit them again.
After the years and years of aggressive proselytism around the fundamental right to bear arms explicitly in order to defend against tyrannical government encroachment on our freedom — even carrying signs quoting Thomas Jefferson that say “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” — here we are with a GOP government saying that a man who was legally carrying a weapon deserved to be shot and killed by government agents simply because he was armed.
In fairness there is some push back from some Trump followers. Despite a mealy mouthed response from the NRA and some fatuous throat clearing about “both sides” there aren’t really all that many staunch gun rights advocates showing much opposition to the administration’s embrace of government tyranny. There’s little reason to believe that most of the MAGA faithful are all that upset that the Trump administration is saying that liberal protesters don’t have the same right to bear arms that they do. That’s just common sense in their minds.
The right wing second amendment fetish has always been about who gets to carry guns more than anything else. As historian Rick Perlstein memorably chronicled, Ronald Reagan was happy to sign a gun control law as California Governor after the Black Panthers showed up at the state House for a protest armed to the teeth. A government in the hands of one of their own will always be given the prerogative to use the power of their armed police and military against their common enemies. It is, as Perlstein points out, a simple truth known as Wilhoit’s Law, which says, “conservatism consists of the lone proposition that there must be in-groups the law protects but does not bind and out-groups the law binds but does not protect.”
Update: Houston, he’s got a problem…