Second Amendment advocates have been warning Americans for years that the only thing standing between them and a tyrannical government is individual ownership of firearms. Sadly — tragically — this proposition is on the brink of being tested on the streets of America, although not in the circumstances envisioned.
The tyrannical government in question is not the overreaching liberal nanny state of the gun lobby’s fevered imagination but rather a very real right-wing authoritarian regime that heretofore has been its staunchest ideological ally. This longstanding alliance has been frayed by the Trump administration’s reaction to the murders of two peaceful protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents in Minneapolis.
After Pretti was executed by two agents participating in the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took the lead in blaming and defaming the victim, whom she claimed was brandishing a gun and who, DHS said, “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
Video analysis soon demonstrated that this characterization was not merely a lie, but a preposterous one. Pretti, holding a cellphone, had come to the aid of two female protesters who were pepper sprayed. When he resisted being taken into custody, a struggle ensued during which a Border Patrol agent yelled multiple times, “He’s got a gun.”
Which he did, and which he was legally carrying. However, the analysis revealed, when agents fired multiple rounds into Pretti, he was restrained in a prone position, and had already been disarmed.
At that point, the government’s rationale shifted, suggesting that Pretti was responsible for his own death because he (lawfully) possessed a weapon at the protest. FBI director Kash Patel said that no one can “bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest you want. It’s that simple.” Noem concurred, saying she didn’t “know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt chimed in that “any gun owner knows” that carrying a gun raises “the assumption of risk and the risk of force being used against you” during interactions with law enforcement. Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, posted more bluntly yet on social media. “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you,” he wrote.
For his part, President Trump told diners at a restaurant in Iowa, “I don’t like that he had a gun. I don’t like that he had two fully loaded magazines. That’s a lot of bad stuff.” He earlier said, “You can’t walk in (to protests) with guns.”
Sorry, Mr. President, but your Supreme Court says otherwise. The conservative justices in recent years have discovered — some might say invented — in the Second Amendment a broad right to individual ownership and possession of firearms for self-defense, including in public spaces, that fully contradicts the government’s rationale for shooting Pretti.
The blowback was not long in coming. The National Rifle Association, which is reliably outraged by the smallest perceived infringement of Second Amendment rights, was uncharacteristically restrained in its reaction, saying that the California prosecutor’s thinking was “dangerous and wrong.” Others were not as muted. “Showing up at a protest is very American. Showing up with a weapon is very American,” wrote Tennessee state Rep. Jeremy Faison, a Republican.
There are several strands to unwind here. The Trump administration’s embrace of the Second Amendment is tactical and conditional, and may be stated as, “We fully support protesters being armed, so long as they’re our protesters, as at the Jan. 6 insurrection.”
The second is that the dry abstraction of the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Second Amendment cases, as in other realms of the law, has very real consequences in the real world.
Third, while the idea of arming oneself against a lawless and violent government in self-defense or to protect others may seem compelling, the fact is that the government will always be able to bring overwhelming lethal force to bear in any confrontation with individuals or collections of individuals.
Fourth, the only real bulwark against tyranny is not a gun, but moral force in the form of an informed, engaged and active citizenry, and journalists who courageously do their jobs. The Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole noted recently in The New York Review of Books that at the time of their deaths, both Good and Pretti were engaged in observing and documenting the misconduct of federal agents. In short, they were doing the one thing that authoritarian regimes can’t abide and democracy can’t do without — bearing witness.