So what if Alex Pretti had a gun?

Increasingly, the Trump administration’s defense of Alex Pretti’s killing has come to center on the fact that he had a gun. “We respect that Second Amendment right, but those rights don’t count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct and impede law enforcement officers,” Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol’s commander-at-large, told CNN over the weekend. “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want,” FBI Director Kash Patel said during a Fox News hit. This is a weak defense on the merits; we have video evidence that federal agents disarmed Pretti before they killed him. But it’s also a flagrant contradiction of decades of conservative dogma, which insisted that American citizens have an unquestionable right to openly carry weapons, including at protests. The Trump administration isn’t just dissembling about Pretti (who was, it should be noted, legally permitted to carry in Minnesota). They are trampling one of the core beliefs of the movement they claim to lead. Gun rights groups have mostly been critical of this position. “Every peaceable Minnesotan has the right to keep and bear arms—including while attending protests, acting as observers, or exercising their First Amendment rights. These rights do not disappear when someone is lawfully armed, and they must be respected and protected at all times,” the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus said in a statement. And it’s clear that the politics of it are terrible for the administration: Prominent Republicans in both Minnesota and Washington have criticized the shooting, and anonymous DHS officials are leaking to CNN and Fox News about how poorly Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have handled themselves. Even Trump himself is now taking a more conciliatory position on the Minneapolis deployment. So what’s remarkable is the degree to which conservative movement stalwarts have been consistently willing to adopt the Bovino-Patel-Noem line. Witness Erick Erickson, a prominent conservative commentator — who has said the NRA is too squishy on guns — essentially blaming Pretti’s death on his decision to carry. “I think you, when engaging in obstruction with federal agents, can get hurt. When armed, things can go wrong,” Erickson wrote. Dana Loesch, one of the most prominent gun rights advocates in America, took a similar line. “You cannot obstruct a law enforcement operation,” Loesch wrote on her Substack. “This is illegal. It’s made even worse if you do it while you are armed. Pretti made the choice to disrupt a federal operation…which set off a chain reaction of tragic events.” And far-right podcaster Matt Walsh, who has described gun-toting teen Kyle Rittenhouse as a “hero,” took an even more aggressive stance — castigating those conservatives that dared to criticize the emerging federal line. “An armed leftist went out with a gun to deliberately interfere with legitimate law enforcement operations, and I’m seeing some ‘conservatives’ on this site claim that it might be ICE’s fault that the guy is now dead. Insane. Some of you people will never fucking learn,” Walsh posted on X. These figures are not the most devoted MAGA-conspiracy types, akin to Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer. They are ideological conservatives who got in the game well before Trump ran for president, and have stated principles over and above personal devotion to the president and his movement. In theory, they’re supposed to stand for conservatism even when it’s inconvenient for the White House. The fact that they’re not, even when events create such a flagrant contradiction between one of their party and one of their most foundational beliefs, shows just how completely many on the right have sold their souls to power. The professional conservatives’ hypocrisy To understand just how hypocritical the right-wing stance is here, it’s important to first reconstruct the conservative take on Pretti’s killing as charitably as possible. Conservatives believe that the state has a right and obligation to enforce its laws, including by deporting people who are in the United States unlawfully. The federal operation in Minneapolis is designed to enforce said laws, but the local authorities’ refusal to assist ICE’s deportation campaign is (for conservatives) tantamount to lawless rejection of federal authority. On this view, people like Alex Pretti are also obstructing a legitimate function of government. Federal agents will, at times, have no option but to subdue them by force. It’s perhaps tragic when that produces a fatal incident, but it’s the protestors’ fault that it’s happening in the first place. “The Left is in a cycle of constant self-radicalization—the resistance to ICE creates the predicate for tragedies that are used to justify ever-more resistance and the demand for the de-facto nullification of federal immigration law in Minneapolis,” writes Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review magazine. But Lowry and his allies get what’s actually happening in Minneapolis backward. It is not activists behaving lawlessly, but rather ICE agents who are indiscriminately arresting and beating Minnesotans while claiming (with the vice president’s explicit permission) that they can go so far as breaking into people’s homes without a judicial warrant. Such abuses of civil liberties are not necessary for enforcing immigration law. Many DHS officials themselves are critical of the current strategy on pure effectiveness grounds, seeing it as inefficient relative to a national push targeting known criminal migrants. Even Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican’s Republican, has admitted this, saying in the wake of the Pretti shooting that the feds needed to adopt a “more structured” deportation policy that can avoid “all the kinds of problems and fighting in communities that they are experiencing right now.” But on the level of principle, it’s worth seeing how flagrantly the Erickson-Lowry logic contradicts the right’s long-standing Second Amendment advocacy. The orthodox conservative movement position is that the Second Amendment exists as a safeguard against tyranny. Well, masked agents of the state beating and even killing Americans on the streets of a major city looks an awful lot like tyranny to many Americans! After the killing of Renee Good, it makes sense — according to traditional conservative theories — for someone like Alex Pretti to carry a weapon while protesting the state and challenging its agents. To cite Pretti’s decision to carry as a justification for his killing is to directly betray the entire premise of the conservative movement’s pro-gun stance. And no, it doesn’t make a difference for this point that Pretti supposedly “interfered” with ICE by aiding a woman their officers had attacked. He was, in his judgment, standing up to tyranny — without ever drawing his weapon or threatening an agent. If the mere fact that he had a gun during this made his killing defensible to the right, or at least understandable, then their stated principle — that citizens have a right to judge state actions tyrannical, and arm themselves when they fear said tyranny — carries no real weight. The twilight of the limited government conservative The only possible recourse for the right here is to argue that Pretti is simply wrong: ICE is not behaving tyrannically, which means that Pretti did not have a legitimate right to arm himself while resisting its operations. But if that’s the case, then the entire operating logic of the Second Amendment as bulwark against tyranny goes out the window. That logic depends on the idea that citizens have not only a right, but a duty to judge when the state becomes tyrannical — and resist accordingly. If the right only extends to people that conservatives judge to be correct on the merits, then they are not endorsing a consistent principle of limited government: They are endorsing a principle of “armed resistance for me, bullets to the chest for thee.” Of course, it’s nothing new to see conservatives betray their stated limited government principles. Over and over again, on issues ranging from tariffs to executive power, conservatives have faced choices between Trump’s position and their own stated belief in the limited role of the state in public life. And over and over again, Republicans and their ideological allies have lined up behind Trump. But guns are different. For people like Loesch and Erickson, the Second Amendment is one of the fundamental reasons to be a Republican in the first place. Part of what they get out of the deal with Trump is that his judges will endorse far more expansive views of gun rights than those appointed by a Democrat. It’s one of the core principles of their Faustian bargain. But now, we’re seeing the bill come due. A lawful gun owner was killed by agents of the state, after he had been subdued and without ever threatening those agents, and the state is citing the sheer fact of his gun ownership as justification. It’s as clear-cut an example of the state treading on Second Amendment principles as one could imagine — hence why gun rights groups have, to their credit, been critical. That America’s conservative ideologues are having so much trouble doing the same illustrates just how much partisanship, and a willingness to align oneself with power, has corroded many on the right.