Alex Pretti’s martyrdom in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the hands of a group of excited Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents followed hard upon Renée Good’s two weeks earlier. Watching the video of these spontaneous public executions of what appear to be ordinary American citizens has led many caring souls in the United States and across the globe to see a diabolical hand at work within the core of the political system run from Washington, DC. The debate is raging as to who are the devils and who are the angels.

Following Good’s killing on January 7, administration officials claimed that the agent who shot her was acting in self-defense. He claimed she was seeking to run him over with her car. In Pretti’s case, the excuse was that he had a gun. We’ve long known that if the US loves two things, it’s cars and guns.

Cars, of course, may be used as lethal weapons, but that is not what they were built for. Handguns, however, have no other credible purpose than to wound or kill another human being. It was therefore easy to conclude that if Pretti was carrying a weapon, his intention could only have been to use it against the law enforcement officers whose job he appeared intent on impeding.

A citizen was dead and very quickly was widely lamented. Law enforcement had acted perhaps excessively, but that was hardly exceptional. All should have fallen into order (as in the expression, “law and order”) if only an unexpected aporia hadn’t emerged. Most people expect the political ideology associated with Republican conservatism to weigh in systematically on the side of rigorous law enforcement. Traditionally, these same promoters of respect for the law and no pity for lawbreakers also fiercely defend the right of ordinary citizens to “bear arms.” They gleefully follow the historically contestable logic of a Bill of Rights designed for a very different 18th century society.

Here, however, was a case of a law enforcement entity that literally resembles a militia executing in cold blood someone guilty of the crime of exercising a constitutional right they ordinarily hold as sacred. Indeed, many of them deem it not just a right but a duty for upstanding citizens to possess and carry a firearm. They do so on the rather shaky grounds that there can be nothing to fear from “a good guy with a gun.”

Video of the killing demonstrates clearly that all those statements were outright lies. But affirming falsehoods created a new problem for this administration that sees domestic law and order as the object of a military campaign. The suggestion that Pretti was “guilty” because he had a gun upset most of those who believe that the second amendment has the value of a second commandment.

The debate surrounding this quandary of whether Pretti was a good guy or a bad guy highlights two essential features of US culture. The first is the tendency of all Americans, whatever their ideology or political preferences, to avoid debate, refuse to consider nuance and literally “stick to one’s guns” in the name of defending a belief. Whether that belief is the conviction of the divine origin of the second amendment (and the US Constitution itself); the inherent virtue of capitalism or socialism; abortion rights; climate “truth” or simply the right to censor and cancel people for their opinions on any of these so-called “principled” issues, rather than seeking to understand what considerations motivate the opposing point of view, they prefer branding their opponent’s position as extreme and inflexible. This reflects a broader trend in US culture to see context as irrelevant and adherence to “principle” as the foundation of morality.

The other feature illustrated by these killings in Minneapolis is even harder to deal with precisely because the only way to frame it is in legal terms, as a policy to be concretized in legislation rather than a social and cultural issue. I’m referring to the strange phenomena (for those outside the US) of America’s gun culture.

Why was Pretti carrying a gun? The easy answer to that is that he was exercising a constitutional right. But such an answer evades the real question: Why was he “brandishing” a telephone? That is also his constitutional right, but to answer that we would cite two obvious purposes: to make and receive calls and to take pictures or record video. As for the gun, the authorities claimed his purpose was to attack them. Defenders of the notion of “gun rights” (can guns have rights?) will probably respond that Pretti “carried” to protect himself from any number of threats coming from either crazy people or animals. His behavior at the time of the confrontation showed that he wasn’t at that moment ready to take the initiative of using it even for self-protection from the armed and clearly threatening ICE agents.

The question citizens of nations that ignore the notion of “gun rights” inevitably wonder about is this: What is the nature of a society in which people whose daily activities do not ordinarily involve the use of lethal weapons feel compelled to possess, carry and conceal those weapons? The simple answer would be that they have been conditioned to live in a permanent state of fear. We who live elsewhere might then suppose that the much admired dynamism of the US economy depends on the maintenance of a state of insecurity and fear, specifically fear for one’s life. It plays out not only in the city streets but perhaps more permanently in the sense of vulnerability felt by a population who can never be certain that their fortunes or lives will not be destroyed from one day to the next by a lack of health care coverage.

It’s hardly surprising that generations of Americans have come to believe that closure comes and order is only restored when the “bad guys” are physically eliminated. At least they’ve always sold that as a “pretty good story.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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