Arghhhh! I was tiring of the political fighting going on in Minnesota, but can’t stay quiet in the sad goings on associated with the shooting death of Alex Pretti.
For starters, everyone seems to be an instant expert based upon the few seconds of film associated with the shooting, with an almost 100 percent correlation between your politics and whether you think it was justified or murder.
p>One of the greatest ironies is that numerous liberals are defending Pretti’s right to carry concealed, even though they normally think concealed carry is stupid and dangerous, often ending with the ones carrying getting shot instead of the bad guys. So let’s start there.
Pretti has a right in Minnesota to carry concealed and apparently exercised that right with a permit. His right to carry concealed, however, isn’t the issue. It’s his choice to exercise that right in the situation he put himself in.
Now for some facts. There is an active industry promoting the right to carry concealed by providing training and even insurance that includes paying for your legal defense if you’re involved in an incident. Just look up the United States Concealed Carry Association to find out more. Besides training and insurance, it publishes the highly-regarded Concealed Carry magazine, which I have subscribed to off and on over the last maybe 10 years or so.
Not one of the people who makes a living at defending the right to carry concealed would say that Pretti should have been carrying at a protest event where a confrontation with ICE was possible. Emphasis on Not One!
Now let’s get into the actual shooting, which I’ve looked at and can safely say needs a careful legal analysis before you can reach any conclusions. The reason is that rules of police engagement when weapons are involved are complex. In particular, police do not need to see the weapon aimed at them first before they fire in self-defense for the rather obvious reason that if it were pointed at them first, it could be fired at them first as well.
Based on what I’ve seen in the videos, the weapon was not in Pretti’s hand nor did he make any attempt to go after the weapon. During the scuffle with him, however, an ICE agent saw the weapon, called out gun, and attempted to disarm him. The weapon then ended up in the hand of an ICE agent in the scuffle and Pretti then got shot. There have been reports that the gun was also dropped and fired on its own, but that’s not likely the case. Guns like the kind Pretti was carrying rarely if ever go off when dropped.
Either way, did the agent know Pretti was unarmed at the time and shot him anyway or did he think the gun was in Pretti’s hand, so he fired in self-defense? Even if the agent was mistaken, was the shooting still justified because it was a reasonable assumption under the circumstances? In short, it’s not likely as cut and dried as you might assume from the video, which in hindsight looks like murder.
It is also the very epitome of why any concealed carry expert or even knowledgeable amateur (I’m one of those) would have said not to carry in an event where there was a possible clash with federal or state police. Such accidents can and do happen, as we saw here.
Incidentally, this isn’t a situation where the agent had no actual indication that there was a firearm, and had absolutely no reason to fire his weapon. A gun was clearly involved and the ICE agent’s defenders will likely argue that since he didn’t know whose hand it was in, it was reasonable to fire since if it were in Pretti’s hand, he could easily have shot one or more agents. Plus, why would Pretti have brought a gun if he didn’t intend to use it?
The great irony in this situation is that the best case for a conviction would be to present Pretti as an inexperienced, wanna-be concealed carry gun user who wasn’t properly trained and took the weapon to the ICE protest out of ignorance. He was simply exercising his right to concealed carry.
That’s because if he had any training, he should have known better, and it might then be inferred that he had to have an intention to use the gun. This is exacerbated by the type of gun itself, which was a high end, custom-built Sig Sauer P 320 worth an estimated $2,000. A normal Sig P320, in contrast, might be $700. What was he doing at an anti-ICE protest carrying such a sophisticated weapon?
There are two bottom lines to this story. First, his right to carry concealed wasn’t at all the issue. He clearly had such a right, assuming he had an appropriate permit. Nevertheless, he went against any proper training by choosing to carry at such an event. As an aside, the mainstream press is focused on his right to carry concealed without showing any understanding about the training associated with exercising that right.
Second, the video clearly shows that he didn’t reach for the gun or have it in his possession when he was shot, which opens up the question of whether the ICE agent acted in self-defense. But Pretti’s gun was clearly involved and identified, and we don’t yet know whether the ICE agent who shot Pretti knew that the gun wasn’t in his hand or should have known and fired anyway.
There was a chaotic melee going on with several ICE agents. Could it be construed as reasonable to fire under the circumstances or should the ICE agent clearly have known that Pretti had been disarmed? The situation will almost certainly be debated intensely, most likely based on political persuasion, and it’s entirely possible the Federal government will clear the ICE shooter, while some AG in Minnesota will try to charge him with murder.
My best guess is that we are never going to know what actually happened. The ICE agent who did the shooting — for that matter was there more than one — will hide behind the defense that he acted in a reasonable manner under the circumstances, while a Minnesota AG would argue that the agent should have seen that Pretti was unarmed and that it was clearly murder. This assumes that it would actually get to court, which itself isn’t clear. Jurisdiction could easily be disputed.
There is, however, one final result that will not be in dispute. The shooting will become a case study in the concealed carry world for why you never should try to carry concealed in such a situation regardless of your right to do so. Untrained wanna-be good guys with a gun can easily end up dead, and the concealed carry industry will use this as a case study to show why you need to have discretion about when you should carry concealed.
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