When federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last weekend, the reaction from many white gun-owning Americans was immediate disbelief. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and licensed gun owner, was killed during an interaction with Border Patrol officers amid a wave of federal enforcement operations in the city. Bystander videos show agents disarming Pretti moments before gunfire rang out. 

What made Pretti’s death distinct, at least in the public imagination, was who he was supposed to represent. Pretti fit the cultural archetype of the “responsible” gun owner: white, licensed, gainfully employed. His killing unsettled a long-held assumption within mainstream gun culture that the Second Amendment is a time-tested shield for people who follow the rules. Suddenly, the distance between constitutional promise and state practice felt uncomfortably small.

But that realization — that rights only exist at the discretion of those who enforce them — is hardly new. For Black, Brown, and Indigenous Americans, the Second Amendment has long been filtered through policing, surveillance, and the routine threat of state force. Long before Pretti, communities of color learned that constitutional protections do not operate in abstraction; they operate through institutions with guns, authority, and the power to decide in real time whose rights are recognized and whose are ignored.

By: Alain Stephens, January 28, 2026

Read the full story here The Intercept

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