Look, whatever happened with Alex Pretti, it needs to be investigated and any wrongdoing needs to be made public. The rules have to run both ways, and if Kyle Rittenhouse was prosecuted for something so clear, the incident with ICE needs to be looked into.
But it's funny how the people who want to take guns for everyone now, suddenly, say this is proof that gun rights aren't universal.
Alex Pretti clearly touched a federal agent during this whole situation. Whether he meant it as an assault or something else, while not irrelevant in general, doesn't matter to the discussion we're having right now. That touch escalated things, as did the surroundings with loud noises, massive interference in law enforcement operations, and the like. While that doesn't inherently mean the shooting was justified, it all needs to be understood as part of the overall context.
But at The Intercept, this incident apparently is proof that gun rights are only for some of us.
When federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last weekend, the reaction from many white gun-owning Americans was immediate disbelief. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and licensed gun owner, was killed during an interaction with Border Patrol officers amid a wave of federal enforcement operations in the city. Bystander videos show agents disarming Pretti moments before gunfire rang out.
What made Pretti’s death distinct, at least in the public imagination, was who he was supposed to represent. Pretti fit the cultural archetype of the “responsible” gun owner: white, licensed, gainfully employed. His killing unsettled a long-held assumption within mainstream gun culture that the Second Amendment is a time-tested shield for people who follow the rules. Suddenly, the distance between constitutional promise and state practice felt uncomfortably small.
But that realization — that rights only exist at the discretion of those who enforce them — is hardly new. For Black, Brown, and Indigenous Americans, the Second Amendment has long been filtered through policing, surveillance, and the routine threat of state force. Long before Pretti, communities of color learned that constitutional protections do not operate in abstraction; they operate through institutions with guns, authority, and the power to decide in real time whose rights are recognized and whose are ignored.
The author, Alain Stephens, then goes on to talk about how minorities were denied guns throughout the distant past, but he never quite gets to an important point about all of that.
See, while gun rights are universal, the gun control laws that people like him tout in publications like The Intercept were the infringements on people's rights at those times. Black men and women were left disarmed because they were denied their rights.
Yet today, look around for a moment.
While Pretti's death is what it is, and there will be questions about just what it is for years to come, millions of black and brown people lawfully own guns without issue. The race-based gun control laws are no more, but the gun control laws in general are applied in ways that disproportionally impact black and Hispanic populations in various states across the nation. While the laws don't specifically target a particular race, they have the same impact just the same.
It's gun rights advocates who challenge this.
Pretti was killed. That's an unfortunate fact. It looks like he vandalized an ICE vehicle a week or so earlier, which kind of kills the whole "he was only helping" narrative, but doesn't justify him being shot in and of itself.
But his killing, contrary to what some in the administration have said, isn't some evidence that gun rights aren't universal. The fact that every gun rights group out there has decried those comments, simply because the right to keep and bear arms applies to everyone, even those people we may not personally like or agree with.
Somehow, that keeps being left out of these wankers' diatribes on the subject.
Honestly, if we're going to keep dredging up the distant past, then maybe Democrats need to start answering for their opposition to freeing the slaves, their support of segregation, their creation and support for Japanese internment camps in World War II, and the plethora of other laws that oppressed millions of Americans.
