By now, you’ve likely heard about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting death of Alex Pretti in Minnesota. There’s been a massive amount of controversy around this shooting, at least partly because Pretti was armed with a legally owned Sig P320 at the protest where he died.
Now, my purpose in going over this shooting is not to talk about the politics of immigration or about blaming the Trump administration or the Walz administration in Minnesota or the current city government of Minneapolis.
We’re going to talk about the firearms side of things here without delving into the rest of the controversies. Why? Because we focus on guns here.
Now, one thing that the mainstream legacy media keeps talking about is about how the people of Minnesota want ICE to leave their state. Being that those reports come from those particular media sources which have a long track record of pushing an agenda instead of honest reporting, I can’t vouch one way or the other about how the people of that state feel about ICE.
I can, however, let you know what a few legal gun owners in Minnesota think about the Alex Pretti shooting, and they make some interesting points that you may not have heard talked about previously around this situation. You can watch that video below.
Now, I found it particularly interesting that the first two people interviewed specifically either implied or said outright that because Pretti was a gun owner, he had a higher standard of conduct to live up to.
As legal gun owners, we have a responsibility to, if at all possible, avoid conflicts with others, especially while carrying, unless we absolutely must intervene to prevent imminent harm to a person, whether yourself or someone else.
And Pretti was nowhere near following that idea.
As the first guy interviewed mentioned, Pretti put hands on an ICE agent. In other words, he had a physical altercation with a federal law enforcement officer. That is illegal. And being armed while doing it only raised the already high stress levels in the situation.
Now, Pretti might have argued that he intervened to prevent imminent serious bodily harm to someone, but I’m not aware of any evidence that the ICE agent that Pretti put hands on was showing any signs of seriously injuring or killing anyone at that moment (not the intention to do so), so that’s questionable.
Clearly, Pretti made a poor choice in the moment.
Additionally, though, as the second guy interviewed mentioned, Pretti made a foolish choice by carrying a firearm, even legally carried, to a protest, especially the type of protest which has a history of violence in that state already.
Again, we can speculate that Pretti might have argued that he carried a firearm to prevent government agents from causing imminent (meaning immediate and happening at any moment) harm to someone, but without evidence of that threat of harm at the protest that he was attending, he put himself into a dangerous situation.
Additional video has come out since the incident in which Pretti was killed which showed that Pretti kicked out the taillight of an ICE vehicle, swore repeatedly at ICE officers, and spit at an ICE officer (in many areas, spitting on someone is legally considered assault).
Clearly, Pretti was acting very aggressively towards ICE agents and made choices that put him in danger due to his illegal activities (no matter how minor some may have considered those actions to be).
Look, it’s tragic when anyone dies before their time (old age), but Alex Pretti clearly made poor decisions that, especially as a gun owner, he should have not made, and those bad choices put him in danger repeatedly.
Sadly, those poor choices contributed to the situation in which he died.
The lesson: Don’t look for a fight when you are a firearms owner. Be the calming presence in the situation if at all possible. The life that you save by doing so may be your own.
