My respect for the people of the Twin Cities knows no bounds, so this is in no way intended to cast any doubt on what they’ve achieved at a terrible cost, but we may be telling ourselves the wrong story here. I think Trump & Co are pulling back in large part because Alex Pretti was armed. That fact has forced the administration into a contradiction too incoherent even for them. They can’t victim-blame Pretti without acknowledging his gun: if it wasn’t a factor then ICE had no reason to murder him, but if it was a factor then their talking heads have to explain how and why. The alternative would be to argue that carrying a gun has no effect at all — which would put the lie to the right’s fetishistic fantasy.
And there’s no contradiction at all between crediting the people of the Twin Cities and this analysis. Pretti was a nurse whose beliefs led to his commitment to veterans, a strong 2A supporter, and Midwesterner through and through: born in Chicago, raised in Green Bay, studied and worked in Minneapolis. The subtext of his life seems to have been, at his core, a rejection of victimhood. He should be honored on those terms, and one way to honor it is to seriously address the role that guns played in his life, in his death, and in their consequences.