On guns, everyone’s a hypocrite
On the right, the same people who celebrate the Second Amendment are condemning Alex Pretti. On the left, which has long called for limits on gun ownership, we are suddenly invoking his “gun rights.”
When Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people, two of them fatally, at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020 — in self-defense, he said — Republicans made him into a hero. But when Alex Pretti showed up at an anti-ICE demonstration with a loaded handgun, Trump administration officials condemned him as a “would-be assassin” and a “domestic terrorist.”
It’s outrageous. And hypocritical.
Yet, when it comes to guns, everyone’s a hypocrite right now. All of us are allowing the fatal shooting of Pretti in Minneapolis last week to alter our principles.
On the right, the same people who celebrate the Second Amendment — and its supposedly sacred guarantee of “gun rights” — are condemning Pretti for exercising that right. And on the left, which has long called for limits on gun ownership, we are suddenly invoking Pretti’s constitutional entitlement to arm himself.
We can’t bring ourselves to state the obvious: His gun made him less safe, not more so.
That’s been our mantra for more than a half century, and we have the data to prove it. Americans purchase guns because they believe firearms will protect them from crime and injury. But they are wrong about that, as a wide swath of research shows.
If someone breaks into your house, a 2015 study reported, you’re more likely to be injured after threatening your attacker with a gun than if you call the police or run away. Gun ownership also makes domestic violence more common. In 2019, scholars found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership also record more domestic gun homicides.
The following year, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a big spike in American gun sales: People were afraid, so they armed themselves. And guess what happened? There was also a sharp rise in firearm-related homicides.
Finally, states that make it easier to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon experience more homicides than states that make it harder to obtain one.
You’d think my fellow liberals would be trumpeting all of these facts following the death of Pretti. But you’d be wrong. We have simply pointed out that Pretti had a permit for his gun and that he had a right to carry it under the Constitution.
“The Trump administration does not believe in the 2nd Amendment,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom posted on X, gleefully mocking GOP attacks on Pretti. “Good to know.”
Come again? I thought Democrats believe the Second Amendment does not — or should not — allow individual citizens to carry firearms anywhere they want.
For most of our history, it didn’t. Ten states passed laws in the 1800s barring possession of concealed weapons. One of them was Texas, where the governor declared in 1893 that “the mission of the concealed weapon is murder.”
In 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal limit on gun ownership. According to Solicitor General Robert Jackson, who would join the court two years later, the Second Amendment did not protect the right of individuals to possess guns for “private purposes.” Instead, it was “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security,” Jackson added.
Only in the 1970s would the National Rifle Association — which had formerly supported broad restrictions on guns — start to argue that the Second Amendment protected individual gun ownership. Now that’s the law of land, thanks to several recent rulings by Republican-appointed federal judges.
Democrats have loudly questioned these decisions, looking forward to the day when they might be overturned. But that won’t happen if we don’t consistently denounce the idea that anyone should be able to carry a gun.
And that includes Pretti. There was no good reason — none — for federal agents to kill Pretti last week in Minneapolis. He didn’t deserve to die because he had a gun. But — especially in the current political climate — it’s hard to come to any other conclusion except that carrying a gun certainly made it more likely that he would.
Video of the shooting appears to show that Pretti’s gun had already been removed from him before he was shot. In the confusion of the moment, some of his assailants might not have known that.
But here’s what we do know: Guns are a scourge on America. We think they safeguard us from violence, but they too often escalate it. We shouldn’t let the horror and injustice of Pretti’s death blind us to that.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools.”