The U.S. gun lobby is furiously pushing back against a Trump-government narrative after a Veteran Affairs nurse Alex Pretti was murdered by ICE agents. I am using the word ‘murder’ here intentionally: this was not a legal action performed by bonafide police officers. Instead, this was the brutal shooting of a man who by all evidence had already been disarmed during an otherwise peaceful protest.
There is no doubt in my mind that the ICE agents should be on trial for murder.
The story
The nurse in question was licensed for concealed carry: not something I personally feel is appropriate, but it is part of common law in many if not most states. Americans and their guns, right? He had his gun, as he was legally entitled to, at a protest against ICE raids. A woman was pepper sprayed and the nurse put himself between the agents and the protestor.
The agents noticed the gun, disarmed Pretti while clubbing him with pepper spray canisters, and he then basically surrendered. The agents finally shot Pretti several times, presumably to prove how awesome they are: one even gave a celebratory clap of his hands because pricks will be pricks. The BBC has a decent article on the subject without my vitriol.
NRA’s concern
The problem as far as NRA and similar groups wasn’t that an innocent man was gunned down. The problem was that Trump agents including a Federal prosecutor said publicly that people who carry guns risk being “lawfully” shot by officers. Per the above BBC article
The NRA labelled a suggestion by a federal prosecutor that people who carry guns risk being lawfully shot by officers as “dangerous and wrong”.
But carrying a gun is your 2nd amendment right. Waffle house? Carry your semi-auto rifle. Home Depot? Carry your Glock- why not two of them, and three or four magazines of extra ammo? All legal and perfectly legitimate things for patriotic, law-abiding citizens.
It is a bit of a quandary. Guns carried by citizens are good, but police might shoot you if you have a gun. That sends a bad message… or something. Trump’s admin seems to have quickly walked back any suggestion that the nurse’s gun was a problem.
To be clear: I am definitely on board the “don’t carry a gun to a protest” side of things, but it was Pretti’s right as an American citizen to do so. The ‘public police’ who marched around in full body armour and semi-auto weapons during the Black Lives Matter protests were all white. There is a good reason for that: the police in some areas are itching for a chance to shoot a black man. But a white man has his God-given right to protect himself with a 30 round magazine and bullets as fast as he can pull the trigger, and the police are all down with protecting that right.
But the right wing has very few positive talking points to work with in this case. The man ICE killed was white (why should that matter? Come on, read the room…), served in a noble profession (health care, serving Veterans), and obviously wasn’t some kind of commie bastard. Clearly the ICE agents shot him for no good reason, other than to give themselves gun boners of their own. But that is a hard one to spin, so instead they moved on to some other topic as fast as they could.
Because publicly murdering an American citizen who died protecting another protestor is maybe, just possibly, a bridge too far for the right-wing evangelicals at the core of Trumpism. The extreme MAGAts are still on board, but the religious folks who can forgive rape, bribery, corruption, greed, and racism- well, murder might be a teeny tiny bit harder apparently.
Or maybe it is just the NRA raising a ruckus that caused Trump to back down a bit, demote SS Uber-jacket wearer Greg Bovino, and reduce ICE troop placements in the area. Could murder be acceptable to the whole base, just not the NRA? It is hard to know. Thus far nothing Trump and his band of idiots have done seems to have erased the 30% of US voters who still say they would vote for him. Maybe nothing will.
