The more I see about what happened with Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the less I know about it. I’m fine with that, because it’s not my place to make a final determination as to whether the shooting was justified or not.
It is my place to take issue with the members of the administration, including the president, who have suggested that it was somehow wrong for Pretti to be carrying a firearm, that the presence of it and spare magazines suggested nefarious intent.
I don’t think carrying a firearm to a protest is a great idea much of the time, but especially when the protest in question involves interfering with law enforcement. It’s unwise, to say the least, but “wisdom” and “legality” aren’t synonyms.
He had a right to carry, and while he may not have had his permit on him, that’s a petty misdemeanor. It’s not an earth-shattering crime.
Yet when people get selective about the carrying of firearms, you aren’t sending a consistent message to the masses. You get people who take cranks like this seriously.
Alexi Pretti—an American citizen and ICU nurse—was forced to the ground at gunpoint, wrestled down, handcuffed, and then shot ten times. And now we’re told, by some of the loudest voices on the right, that his death was justified because he had a gun.
For decades, conservatives warned that Democrats were coming for your guns. For decades, they wrapped themselves in the Second Amendment. But when a citizen is killed by federal agents, suddenly the mere presence of a firearm becomes a retroactive death sentence. The same political movement that shouts “constitutional rights” now shrugs when those rights are erased in real time.
This isn’t inconsistency. It’s design.
We’ve also seen the other side of this story. Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with an AR-15, killed two people, and became a cause célèbre on the right—defended, fundraised for, and celebrated as a hero. On January 6, armed insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol with tactical gear, bear spray, stun guns, bats, and nearby firearms, explicitly seeking to overturn a democratic election. Many were treated with restraint in the moment, while Republican leaders later minimized the violence.
So let’s be honest: this was never about guns.
Gun politics in America has always been about power—who is allowed to feel protected, and who is treated as expendable. Armed vigilantes are embraced. Armed insurrectionists are excused. But when Black activists patrol their neighborhoods, the law changes overnight. When a lawful gun owner like Alexi Pretti tries to help others, he is killed—and then blamed for his own death.
Gun regulation in this country has often expanded not from neutral safety concerns, but from racial anxiety and power dynamics. Open-carry rights have never been applied equally. Early militia laws tied gun ownership to white male citizenship. The modern “gun rights vs. gun control” debate continues that legacy, centering who counts as a legitimate bearer of arms—and whose safety the state prioritizes.
And here’s the thing, that last bit is kind of hard to disprove when Kash Patel sits there on national television and argues that no one who goes to a protest armed has peaceful intentions and that having multiple magazines was somehow proof that he was there to cause trouble.
I have no problems believing Pretti was there to be a problem, mind you. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a run-in with ICE, apparently, and I doubt this would have been his last. He might even have crossed the line at some point. However, just having a gun isn’t an indicator all by itself.
Yet because Pretti was on the left, you get jackwagons like this guy who are able to try and make the case that it’s selective support for gun rights. Kyle Rittenhouse was, in fact, armed at a protest, too. He defended himself from a mob, as was his right.
And everyone lashing out at the fact that Pretti had a gun at all sounds an awful lot like those who attacked Rittenhouse just for having one, too.
There are a lot of things you can hit Pretti on, but being armed and having spare magazines shouldn’t be one of them.
Of course, I will also knock this crank for ignoring how pretty much every gun rights group has stepped up and called the administration down for their comments. For the most part, the gun rights community has stood up for Pretti’s right to keep and bear arms. We’ve called out those who have argued otherwise for being wrong.
That, somehow, didn’t make it into this screed, and we also know that it will get memory-holed by the mainstream media, who will instead focus on key administration officials suggesting otherwise.
Don’t make life easy for them, folks. Be consistent, even if you don’t like the other guy, and you’re a lot harder to attack as a hypocrite.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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