Gun shops in the western North Carolina Mountains may not unanimously agree on federal gunmen’s fatal shooting of 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, but they certainly seem to be following the news.
Pretti, a licensed gun carrier with no criminal record, was killed when he was struck with at least five of the 10 rounds fired from only steps away by the US Customs and Border Protection agents — after they had already disarmed him.
Doc Wacholz, owner of Murphy’s Cherokee Guns, compared Pretti’s behavior to carrying gasoline instead of water to put out a fire.
“The first thing I do in any interaction with (a law enforcement) officer is tell the officer that I have a gun on me,” Wacholz said. “It’s common sense, and he should have told them first thing that he had a gun on him. If he had done that he’d probably be alive today.”
Wacholz said he doesn’t question the right to carry a gun, but said any one with common sense would know that the situation on the Minneapolis streets when Pretti was shot was akin to a tinderbox.
“You don’t go into a house on fire with a bucket of gasoline,”: he said. “You carry water.”
The Gun Owners Association of America and the National Rifle Association have called for a full and independent investigation of Pretti’s shooting by the Boarder Patrol agents.
The gun rights groups were particularly angered by social media comments from Bill Essayli, a California federal prosecutor, that, “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.”
“I don’t agree at all with that sentiment — to say he deserved to get shot because he had a gun. That is bullshit basically,” said the manager of a Blairsville, Ga., firearms outlet who declined to give his name for publication.
“This calls into question a lot of different things,” he said of the Trump Administration’s early claims — since somewhat softened — that Pretti was a terrorist who meant to do “maximum damage” to the masked agents of ICE and the Border Patrol. “It makes you wonder what we’ve been told in the past that may have been a total fabrication.”
Minnesota officials have said Pretti was a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry and no criminal record. He worked as an ICU nurse for the Veteran’s Administration Medical Center in Minneapolis.
Videos taken by bystanders to the shooting show that Pretti had his cell phone in one hand and his other hand was empty when as many as five masked men employed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and the Boarder Patrol dragged him to the ground, beat him, disarmed him, and then shot him.
The federal gunmen fired a fusillade of 10 rounds toward Pretti’s body from just feet away. At least five of the shots, perhaps more, struck the victim.
President Trump has ordered hundreds of his battle-racked and- ready ICE and Border Patrol employees — outfitted as if they were entering a combat zone — into Minneapolis in what he has said is an immigrant enforcement operation, but is seen by some Democrats and others as a vengeance campaign against political enemies and the city’s Somali residents.
The Minneapolis area has some 80,000 to 85,000 Somali natives that settled there starting in the 1990s after fleeing civil war in their own country. A large majority of Somalis in Minnesota are U.S. citizens, with many foreign-born residents being naturalized citizens.
Trump has referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage,” “scammers,” and “bandits,” and has claimed that they have “destroyed our country” and “contribute nothing”.
He also has described Somalia itself as a “hellhole” or “disaster,” and frequently disparages U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and a Somali-born U.S. citizen. He has called her “garbage” and accused of hating the United States — charges she has repeatedly denied.
In his latest, and somewhat softened comments, Trump has called Pretti’s death, “a very unfortunate incident,” but nonetheless blamed the nurse himself for the shooting.’
“You can’t have guns,” the president said, “you can’t walk in with guns, you can’t do that. But it’s a very unfortunate incident.”
U.S. law, in many states, including Minnesota, however, allow for gun owners who have the proper licenses or certification — known as a “conceal carry permit” to carry either exposed weapons or carry them unexposed, or concealed.
In a notable case championed by the political right in the U.S., a man named Kyle Rittenhouse took an assault rifle to rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and shot three people, two of them fatally.
He was 17 at the time and was lionized as a hero by many on the right.
But Wacholz said the Rittenhouse case is apples and oranges.
“That’s different,” he said. “They tried to take his gun, (Rittenhouse) was fighting for his life . . . That wasn’t the situation in Minneapolis.”
Two of the men who had tried to grab Rittenhouse’s gun died and the third, who pointed a handgun at him, was shot and injured.
Rittenhouse’s lawyers argued that Rittenhouse had acted in self defense, and he was acquitted in November 2021.
Bryan Strawser, chairman of the Minnesota gun owners caucus, said much of the initial government reaction to Pretti’s shooting was misleading at best, particularly the remarks from the California federal prosecutor.
“Bill Essayli’s comments were completely out of line and inappropriate,” said Strawser, in remarks reported in The Guardian. “This is a horrible tragedy and it’s complicated by the fact that the messaging from the federal government has been very misleading and that causes a lot of distrust and disappointment.”
Strawser said it’s a view broadly carried among gun rights groups: “They’ve aligned with the messaging that this isn’t about partisanship, or not supporting law enforcement, but Americans bearing arms,” he continued.
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