The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – which states that Americans' right to bear arms "for the security of a free state ... not be infringed" — has now put both Americans and law enforcement in a uniquely precarious position.
That's according to a Monday analysis by the Atlantic's Barry Friedman and Brandon Del Pozo, who wrote that the federal agents' recent killing of 37 year-old Minneapolis, Minnesota resident Alex Pretti has signaled a tipping point in the relationship between citizens and the police, putting them "on a potentially catastrophic collision course." They lamented that the shooting was simultaneously fatal for Pretti and "delegitimizing for law enforcement."
"A broader crisis of government legitimacy is imminent in the absence of a change in direction by the Trump administration," Friedman and Del Pozo wrote.
Pretti — an ICU nurse at Minneapolis' Department of Veterans' Affairs hospital — was a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry a firearm. And video taken just prior to Pretti being shot appears to show an agent confiscating Pretti's 9mm handgun, meaning he was not a threat to agents at the time he was killed. Friedman and Del Pozo noted that Pretti was "holding only a phone" when he was "pepper-sprayed and thrown to the ground." It was only then that agents noticed Pretti's holster, seized his weapon and shot him in the back.
"Pretti died in the street never having touched his gun," they wrote. "He had been disarmed before the first shot was even fired."
According to Friedman and Del Pozo, Second Amendment absolutists would disagree with the government's argument that Pretti bringing a firearm to a protest was a legitimate reason to kill him. They further argued that the "shall not be infringed" portion of the Second Amendment requires that police be "highly trained" and act with "discipline and restraint" when encountering a citizen expressing their constitutional rights. The Atlantic authors then asserted that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are woefully undeprepared before being deployed to police American cities.
"ICE agents are poorly screened and quickly hired. They spend just 47 days in their training academy, a shorter duration than nearly all law enforcement organizations; Minnesota, for example, requires about double the training for its police officers at 1,050 hours," they wrote. "In the field, they are saddled with quotas for how many people they must apprehend. That leads to desperate measures and poor decisions."
The Atlantic authors opined that while there are often elected officials who simultaneously defend the Second Amendment as well as stand by law enforcement officers who kill citizens, the positions are "flatly incompatible" in the aftermath of the Alex Pretti shooting.
"If elected officials are going to stump for the Second Amendment, and at the same time refuse to hold a federal agency accountable for killing an American exercising that very right, the country is at risk of losing any right to protest," they wrote. "And the federal government is calling into question its legitimacy."