Minneapolis: In 2018, conservative activist and Donald Trump ally Charlie Kirk said the Second Amendment – the right to bear arms – was not made so that Americans could hunt animals or protect themselves from strangers.
“It is there to ensure that free people can defend themselves if, god forbid, government became tyrannical and turned against its citizens,” said Kirk, who was shot and killed last year.
That day has seemingly come. And yet, the American right – the Trump/MAGA right, at least – is now trying to argue that even slight resistance against federal immigration agents, including having a gun, justifies a person being shot dead.
It is another remarkable contortion from hollow people who will apparently jettison any principle or belief to comply with the authoritarian tendencies of the Trump administration.
Two Americans have now been killed by federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis in just three weeks. Their families say they were sweet, passionate people who could not sit back and watch while masked men snatched members of their community off the streets.
The US government, meanwhile, calls them “domestic terrorists” who had it coming for harassing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Officials from Vice President JD Vance down have declared that the agents enjoy absolute immunity when performing their duties.
We are seeing the results of that instruction. Antagonism, aggression and violence that boils over into killing.
In this case, the administration is relying on the fact that Alex Pretti was armed to argue that an agent, fearing for his life, fired defensively on Saturday when the 37-year-old was killed.
Pretti was licensed to carry a firearm, though, and it is legal to do so in Minnesota. A key question in this case, then, is what Pretti was actually doing with the gun at the time.
Despite the administration’s attempts to imply that the intensive care nurse posed an imminent threat, officials have side-stepped whether he was actually brandishing the weapon.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was quick to clear an ICE agent over the shooting of Renee Good on January 7, was asked the question directly and responded by saying Pretti “showed up” with a gun.
Greg Bovino, the trench coat-wearing Border Patrol commander, also ducked the question, saying there would be an investigation into the blow-by-blow.
Some commentators have suggested the video shows Pretti reaching for his holster while struggling on the pavement with multiple agents.
The Trump administration’s truism is that the protesters wouldn’t be harmed if they weren’t there in the first place – if they didn’t try to obstruct law enforcement, if they didn’t put themselves in harm’s way, if they didn’t seek out trouble and attention.
For some people, that will be persuasive.
But this is a country that prides itself on free speech, the right to protest and – for better or worse – the right to lethal weapons.
So it should not come as a surprise to the administration, nor the officers on the ground, that some people will resist Trump’s mass deportation drive and his ICE officers’ tactics.
Indeed, the claims by Trump administration officials about Pretti’s culpability for his own death have spooked even the National Rifle Association.
It was particularly irked by a comment from Trump appointee Bill Essayli, first assistant US attorney for the Central District of California, who opined: “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.”
That sentiment was “dangerous and wrong”, the NRA said. “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalisations and demonising law-abiding citizens.”
When the NRA is the rational voice in the room, you’ve got problems.
American conservatives have strayed far from the ideals they once held as sacrosanct, in service of US Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller’s worldview that the country’s greatest threat is “the enemy within”. In that framing, it is the refuseniks – the troublemakers, the leftist agitators, the “domestic terrorists” – who must be quashed and whose constitutional rights can be ignored.
The administration is doing its best to normalise that framing. But it is not clear whether it has achieved that goal.
Most Americans think ICE has gone too far in its tactics, according to a New York Times/Siena poll this month, even if they approve of shutting the border and deporting illegal immigrants. However, the same poll shows 56 per cent of Republican voters think ICE is getting it “about right”.
This is a country so divided, so consumed by loathing, that it can look at video footage and see two completely different things. It’s a nation of tribes that are unlikely to be swayed from their predisposition by any evidence.
It’s difficult to see what the circuit breaker could be.
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via Twitter or email.
