Residents near the scene of a shooting by a federal law enforcement agent in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, 2026. Photo: Jaida Grey Eagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Border Patrol agents on Saturday shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and U.S. citizen. Pretti was an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital and legally carrying a Sig Sauer pistol. Bystander video shows him filming agents with a phone before being tackled and pinned facedown on the pavement as more than six officers swarm him. According to video of the shooting, at least one officer can be heard shouting “he’s got a gun,” and an agent appears to take Pretti’s weapon and begin to walk away before at least 10 shots ring out. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said in a press conference that Pretti was “a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry.” Federal officials initially defended the shooting as self-defense, insisting Pretti had resisted disarmament and threatened agents. But open-source analysis by Bellingcat concluded the gun had already been taken from Pretti by the time the shots were fired.

Already, much has been made by the administration over the fact that Pretti was armed, a startling legal shift for officials who publicly espouse their love of the Second Amendment.

The Trump Justice Department has now formally embraced the idea that a citizen carrying a legal firearm who approaches federal officers can be shot on sight. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — a Trump appointee — put this new doctrine bluntly: “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.” In effect, the president who demanded absolute loyalty from gun rights voters is sanctioning deadly force against those voters whenever they come near a line of federal officers. This pronouncement came just hours after Pretti’s killing, turning a local tragedy into a national declaration of policy. The gap between Second Amendment rhetoric and the on-the-ground reality of federal law enforcement has never been more obvious.

Have a Gun? Expect a Bullet.

Essayli’s declaration sent shockwaves through America’s gun community, and leaders of pro-gun groups immediately distanced themselves from the White House line. (On Truth Social, Trump posted a photo of the gun, writing, “This is the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go – What is that all about?” Less than 24 hours later, Trump had seemingly moved on, posting about construction on the White House ballroom.) Dana Loesch, a former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association and a conservative radio host, questioned the administration’s contention that Pretti had two loaded magazines as evidence he intended to harm immigration agents: “What he has or didn’t have isn’t the issue. What he was doing, with or without it, is the issue.”

By the end of the day, the NRA — historically among Trump’s biggest backers — had finally issued a lukewarm call for calm and due process and called Essayli’s remarks “dangerous and wrong,” but only after its social media followers lambasted the group for inexplicably staying silent at first. Remember: the NRA funneled some $25 million into Trump’s campaigns. For gun owners who gave Trump everything, the silence was deafening.

For gun owners who gave Trump everything, the silence was deafening.

The conservative advocacy group Gun Owners of America called for a “complete, transparent, and prompt investigation” and flatly rejected the idea that federal agents can justifiably shoot and kill legal gun owners. In a statement responding to Essayli, GOA warned “agents are not ‘highly likely’ to be ‘legally justified’ in ‘shooting’ concealed carry licensees who approach while lawfully carrying a firearm.”

On the ground in Minnesota, gun rights advocates were outraged. The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus demanded evidence that Pretti posed any real threat, and insisted that every lawful citizen has the right to carry arms — even in a protest. Its general counsel, Rob Doar, told local news station KSTP that officers “have to have been in reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily harm” to use deadly force and his read based on the video is “that at the time that the shots were fired he had been disarmed seconds before.” Rick Hodsdon, an expert on permit to carry laws in the state, put an even finer point on the issue: The idea that any citizen approaching armed agents with a legal gun should be shot is “absurd.”

Other vocal critics rebuked Border Patrol statements implying that Pretti was armed to the teeth, and aiming, as official Greg Bovino claimed, to do “maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Veteran gun rights commentator Stephen Gutowski reminded followers that carrying extra magazines is common for permit holders. Others pointed out that this new paradigm risks transforming routine encounters with public safety officials into moments of terror for lawful gun owners. Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education for the Second Amendment Foundation, told The Reload, “People should not fear interacting with police officers simply because they are lawfully carrying a firearm.”

For many Second Amendment stalwarts, the Trump administration’s new stance is the ultimate betrayal. The man who vowed never to infringe on gun rights is now sanctioning lethal force against his own voters.

Thou Shalt Infringe

The Pretti killing and its official defense expose a wider hypocrisy in Trump’s approach to gun rights, despite his rhetoric. While Trump once praised Kyle Rittenhouse — the armed teenager who killed two people at a protest in Wisconsin — as “really a nice young man” who never deserved to go to trial, he has, throughout his career, quietly supported more gun safety measures than he admits.

During his first term, he casually let it slip that he was fine with taking guns without due process before backtracking. During his first administration, he also famously signed a rule banning bump-fire stocks (devices that simulated fully automatic fire) after the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, a rule that was later struck down by the Supreme Court. Just last year, that same court — which is dominated by Trump appointees — upheld a sweeping new Joe Biden-era rule restricting untraceable “ghost guns,” rejecting challenges by gun rights groups.

Meanwhile, Trump has increasingly deployed federal forces into jurisdictions with some of the strictest gun-control laws in the country, using federal authority to lean into those regulations — despite promising to protect gun owners from government overreach. In August 2025, federal agents embedded with local police in Washington, D.C., and seized 111 firearms as part of Trump’s federal surge in the district to combat “crime.” For gun rights advocates, the operation exposed the quiet inversion underway: Federal agents can now treat gun ownership as a novel way to target, harass, and enforce their authority in ways that have little to do with any actual crime. Luis Valdes, a spokesperson for Gun Owners of America, said at the time that these seizures amounted to low-hanging fruit. “Charging [citizens] only for possession of a firearm means they couldn’t even establish reasonable suspicion or probable cause for any other crime,” he said. “We’re not against law enforcement going out there and going after real criminals. We’re just against law enforcement resources being mis-utilized, and having those resources used to violate people’s due process and Second Amendment rights.”

From Chicago to Los Angeles, these federal “surges” have meant heavily armed federal agents roaming neighborhoods looking to scoop up American firearms along the way — hardly a symbol of Second Amendment liberation. At the same time, the Justice Department has quietly pursued policies that make life harder for gun owners, not easier. While Trump’s February 2025 executive order on firearms directed the DOJ to review Biden-era regulations, many of his more expansive campaign promises remain outstanding, leaving little evidence that his administration has meaningfully expanded ordinary Americans’ access to firearms.

Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” for instance, made it cheaper to purchase suppressors and short-barreled weapons but not easier — keeping buyers locked behind the same federal regulatory regime his campaign promised to dismantle. In response, major gun rights groups have moved to mount new legal challenges against Trump’s ATF to eliminate outstanding red tape. And despite early promises to enact national concealed-carry reciprocity — a policy that would require every state to recognize gun permits issued by other states, much like driver’s licenses — that reform has yet to materialize.

Under Trump, gun rights have increasingly been filtered through federal power, not individual freedom.

It is also worth noting who Trump is in this equation: a gun-violence survivor, raised in one of the most restrictive gun safety environments in the country, who publicly champions the gun industry but now governs a far more heavily armed nation from behind layers of federal security. In Trump’s America, the question is no longer whether guns should exist, but whether the government still views the people who legally carry them as legitimate.

The bottom line is harder to ignore: Under Trump, gun rights have increasingly been filtered through federal power, not individual freedom. Now, after a second fatal shooting by federal immigration authorities in Minneapolis in as many weeks, his administration is crystallizing this shift as de facto policy: If an American simply owns a gun in front of feds, the use of “deadly force” is not just permitted but justified. And now that the feds are everywhere, the implications for an armed citizenry are chilling.

All of this flies in the face of Trump’s campaign promises of a Second Amendment utopia. The millions the NRA and pro-gun political action committees funneled into electing him have bought little more than cold comfort. Gun rights groups can protest and litigate but the precedent is now set: Under this administration, trained federal officers can, on executive authority alone, treat legally armed citizens — protesters or otherwise — as legitimate targets. The president who promised not to take away Americans’ guns has effectively signed off on taking away any safety those guns once provided. If this shift endures, it points toward a country with more federal deployments, more armed encounters, and a Second Amendment that exists in theory but not in practice.

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