Sandhill Crane Migration — Othello, WA

One of the craziest things to happen in the past week is the shooting of Alex Pretti, a protester/obstructionist in the current insurrection occurring around ICE operations in Minneapolis, MN. The actual micro-facts of exactly how Pretti ended up getting shot by ICE agents are in dispute, which are where arguments occur nowadays.

But we can learn a lot about where our country’s memetics are by listening to the arguments around his killing. We know for example:

1. He had a pistol — a 9 mm Sig Sauer.
2. He had been involved in prior protests, and apparently had broken a rib.
3. He had a concealed carry permit for his handgun.
4. He was reacting to a woman in an altercation with ICE agents.
5. He was part of a Signal app text network that sent individuals to ICE arrest scenarios.
6. He’s dead.

What follows is more fascinating than just his death. What is interesting to me is HOW people discuss it.

The biggest element is his legality in carrying a gun into such a situation. The lower complexity discussion centers around whether he had a Second Amendment right to carry a pistol in that situation. I believe he absolutely did. Various people have argued that he didn’t have his papers on him. OK. Another correct, but ungrounded, low responsibility argument. Having papers stuffed in his pocket would not have prevented him from getting shot.

But what is completely ignored is whether he SHOULD have carried a gun.

When someone argues he had the right, what they’re really telling you is that the person speaking understands relationships as externally defined. He had the right to carry the gun. Society gave him that right. But what it doesn’t consider is his level of personal agency and independent responsibility in carrying it. It was lethally stupid to decontextualize his decision making into some kind of absolute right. And now he’s dead.

When I was involved in a lengthy Civil Disobedience campaign regarding protection of native wildlands in Idaho, we had a rule for the encampment I helped construct. NO GUNS. We had that rule because it was a good rule — that guns and the chaos inherent in protest, civil or illegal, don’t mix. And that guns far too often give law enforcement a reason to shoot you. And while the legal part may grind on, if you’re on the receiving end of a bullet, you’re still likely to be dead. Activists involved in the campaign did all sorts of crazy stuff — from living in trees, to extended blockades of roads. But NO activists were killed.

And the cops had guns. You better believe it. As the campaign dragged on, US Forest Service law enforcement even upped their training/recruitment, and produced essentially Special Forces, trained to go into the forest after activists, who were pulling all sorts of shenanigans to slow down logging activities. These guys had machine guns, the whole bit. Yet not one activist was shot in the whole crazy shitshow that were the latter years of the Cove-Mallard campaign.

The reason that we did not carry guns was because we were GROUNDED in reality. It wasn’t that hard to figure out someone would get shot in the context of the largely peaceful protests (there was vandalism, make no mistake about it.). But we were independently thoughtful. And the structure of the campaign promoted agency. Anyone wanting to do “night work” was people the rest of us did NOT want to hear about. People organized themselves into Affinity Groups of 2-3 people, and no one wanted to hear about anyone’s plans, unless it was a formal public action that was intended to be a demonstration, for media consumption. In fact, the way our brains were wired at the time, if SOMEONE wanted to hear, that probably meant they were a fed. And we had a few.

What Alex Pretti’s shooting shows, more than anything else, is not how ICE has changed. It shows the principles I’ve discussed in this piece — that the Left has become ungrounded from the actual reality of their actions. If you’re rushing a cop, and you are wearing a weapon, and you DON’T get shot, that’s a miracle. What is fascinating is to see how the Left is papering over the shooting, somehow trying to re-write rules of engagement with law enforcement, that now cops must delay action in an altercation if they see someone with a gun. The only thing that LEOs will do in that situation is exactly what they did to Alex Pretti. Unload a clip into him.

Attempting to have the system take revenge on itself is a more than cynical maneuver by leadership to create martyrs.

I’ve got some bad news. Ain’t gonna happen. And Pretti paid the price.