In an interview with the Wall St. Journal, President Donald Trump held of on passing judgment about whether the shooting of Minneapolis anti-ICE activist Alex Pretty was justified, but suggested that the gun carried by Alex Pretti may have misfired after a Border Patrol agent took the pistol from Pretti’s holster.
Trump told the paper that Pretti had a “very dangerous gun, a dangerous and unpredictable gun,” and added that “It’s a gun that goes off when people don’t know it.” It appears that Pretti was carrying a Sig P320 AXG “Combat” pistol equipped with a red dot sight, and as you’re probably already aware, Sig has been the subject of multiple lawsuits claiming that the P320 can unintentionally discharge without the trigger being pulled.
Some of the videos that show Pretti’s shooting do suggest that it was Pretti’s gun that fired seconds before Border Patrol agents shot him, but by that time the gun was in the hand of an agent who was walking away from the scrum of agents and Pretti.
But President Trump also repeated a talking point we’ve seen from other administration officials; that there was something inherently wrong about carrying a firearm and two magazines at a protest.
The president criticized Pretti—the 37-year-old who was killed by a federal Border Patrol agent Saturday morning on a Minneapolis street—for carrying a gun during protest activity.
“I don’t like any shooting. I don’t like it,” Trump added. “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.”
The president’s comments were more mild than what we’ve seen from officials like DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, who argued that the presence of the pistol and magazines were evidence that Pretti was intent on doing “maximum damage on individuals and… law enforcement.”
FBI Director Kash Patel echoed those comments on Fox News on Sunday, arguing that “No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines.”
Those talking points have received a lot of pushback from Second Amendment groups, activists, and even members of Congress, who’ve rightfully pointed out that plenty of gun owners carry multiple magazines for defensive purposes and that it’s not unusual or uncommon for 2A activists to peacefully bear arms at protests.
Can the FBI just enforce the law without adopting every leftist gun banner talking point?
🚫Carrying a gun = bad intentions.
🚫Loaded guns = bad guns.
🚫Spare magazines = extra bad.
🚫More than 10 rounds = bad.— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 25, 2026
Now, it’s worth noting that, at least so far, no administration official has suggested any change to federal gun laws that would address their complaints. Still, as Massie and others have argued, there’s no need to adopt the talking points of the gun control lobby in response to Pretti’s shooting. It doesn’t matter what kind of pistol Pretti was carrying or how many magazines had on him. When Pretti was shot, none of the agents involved had any knowledge of those facts.
What matters is whether the agents who shot and killed Pretti had reason to believe that lives were in danger, given the totality of the circumstances known to them at the time. That includes Pretti’s struggle with the agents, one agent yelling “gun, gun,” and the sound of a shot being fired.
The administration’s adopting the language of gun control advocates isn’t helpful in defending the actions of the agents involved, and it can do real damage to the support from many gun owners. I hopeful that Second Amendment organizations can engage with the White House and convince administration officials to drop these gun control talking points, but we’ll have to wait and see whether or not they’re successful in doing so.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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