It doesn’t matter if Alex Pretti had a gun

Shortly after federal agents killed Alex Pretti Saturday morning, DHS began to run with the story that the dead man had been armed and dangerous. He had a gun, DHS said. (A Bellingcat analysis of the video concludes that Pretti was unarmed when he was shot.) He had approached the agents holding the gun, DHS said. (He was holding a phone, the New York Times reports.) Pretti died on his knees, surrounded by armed Border Patrol agents, with shot after shot unloaded in his direction.

America’s Second Amendment is beloved by conservatives. Minnesota allows open carry with a permit. Pretti lived in a city where people are regularly being assaulted and even killed by the masked and armed men he was busy observing. So why has so much ink been spilled over the minutiae of his behavior? Why is it so normal for law enforcement — those who are supposed to be keepers of law and order — to kill Americans? And why is the only question at the end of the day how much their victims deserved to die?

In July 2020, the Department of Homeland Security sent in over a hundred federal officers from various agencies to my city of Portland, Oregon. They flooded downtown with a thick fog of brownish tear gas. This didn’t neutralize the crowds — it merely hurt and enraged them. The city understood it was being intentionally tormented by sadists and chose to walk into the tear gas out of spite.

Throughout the protests, politicians and media figures fixated on whether Portland and other cities were the site of “protests” or “riots.” The distinction was drawn solely based on the behavior of the protesters, whose actions were treated as if they occurred in a vacuum. But on the ground in Portland, that felt as if it was missing the point.

The protesters’ actions blurred the definition of nonviolence. They came wearing gas masks and carrying shields. People brought leaf blowers and intentionally blew the tear gas straight back at the agents who threw the canisters. They chucked plastic water bottles at the feds because they hated them and thought it might be funny to bonk them on their militarized helmets. No one was trying to murder the feds, but nevertheless, it was not the same as linking arms and walking down the streets of Selma while singing.

But if a riot was occurring in Portland, the feds had instigated it — preemptively escalating the situation with rubber bullets and pepper balls and gas canisters, weapons that don’t simply blur the definition of “nonlethal” but literally contradict it.

These unequal expectations were unfair to civilians. And they are being applied again, with greater weight and brutality, to the people of Minneapolis.

It is obvious that ICE’s presence in Minnesota is a source of conflict and anxiety. As feds leave disorder and fear in their wake, Minnesotans without training or state-issued protective gear are being asked to behave with greater restraint than the armed agents who are supposed to be upholding the law.

Early reporting would suggest that Pretti was violently killed while engaging nonviolently with federal law enforcement. Videos show that he was holding a phone and moving to help a protester when agents grabbed him by the legs and wrestled him to the ground. The agents shout that he has a gun only after they’ve pinned him to the ground.

But whatever happened, the physical coordinates of Alex Pretti’s purported gun in the few seconds leading up to his killing are far less relevant than the ongoing siege of the Twin Cities. What, in the face of this aggression, is so relevant about his demeanor or his attitude or how he approached the agents right before his death? Why must the victims of state violence be entrusted with the task of not escalating a situation, when they’re not drawing a salary or health insurance or pension on the taxpayer’s dime?

The people are being charged with keeping the peace, asked to stand firm against the federal agents who are disrupting it. This is a sick form of double taxation — your paycheck gets docked so that a guy in a mask can beat you up while you try to calm him down. “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you,” Renee Good told ICE agents moments before they shot her through the side window of her car. Did she deserve to die because she did an inadequate job of tempering their feelings?

What is the point of pinning someone to the ground before pouring pepper spray in his face? What is the point of all of this, except to anger the public, and then to respond to that anger with even more force? ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol have proven themselves incapable of obeying the law, let alone enforcing it for others; unable to self-soothe, let alone keep the peace. ICE and its ilk are not an answer to a problem, but a problem with only one solution. They are malignant, they are worthless, and they should not exist.