All the facts surrounding the ICE shooting of Alex Pretti still aren’t out, but I am of the mind that he absolutely got the ass beating he deserved – and maybe he did deserve to be shot if he still had his pistol on him and was reaching for it. But as near as I can gather, he was shot after he was disarmed, and if that’s the case – well Damn – ain’t that some real shit.

However, no matter the wrong or right of what Pretti did or didn’t do, up until the point he angrily impeded and obstructed the ICE agent in the commission of his duty and fought with him, Pretti had every right to be there watching and protesting, even with his firearm on his side.

As much as I hate the Democrat Communists, they still have a right to peaceful protest, but as we are witnessing, nine times out of ten, their idea of “peaceful protest” comes with a shitload of violence directed at ICE, Border Patrol and anyone identified as a conservative counter-protestor or conservative journalist – the latter two often being swarmed and threatened with bodily harm and death – all of which are part of the reason we all have the right to carry a firearm.

To date, the bulk of the Commies aren’t serious enough about casting off the Trump Government to engage in an all out violent revolution against it, but time remains still to see that very thing. And not trying to prompt any of them in that direction, if I truly believed any government to be as terrible and tyrannical as they tell us the Trump Government is, I most certainly would be running guerilla operations against it and killing as many members of the Government as I could.

I could easily go to war against the communists of America today, and I most certainly will if they ever regain power and attempt to impose any of their tyrannical bullshit on me and mine, at a time when they have complete power and our checks and balances are to no avail, much as they almost were during the Biden regime. It wouldn’t have taken much to tip the nation into full blown tyranny under Biden had Trump not been able to prevail against the numerous lawfare gambits thrown at him.

Whatever the case may be, anti-American communists and American patriots alike have the absolute God-given right to carry their rifle or pistol down Main Street on any given day of the week. And for my part, I welcome the day they finally decide they want to come full on against those of us who stand and defend freedom and individual liberty, because as I always say, I plan on stacking the dead carcasses of the red, radical, anti-God, anti-Life, anti-American, anti-Liberty Democrat Party Commie Rat Bastards ten feet high and ten feet deep all about me in all directions for as far as the eye can see – so help me God – until I either emerge at the end of the war alive and not too worse for the wear or I take my last dying gasp in the fight. ~ J.O.S.

America: “You Can’t Have Guns“

The American people have grown used to hearing constant calls for the eradication of their right to keep and bear arms from the anti-American Democrat Party Communists, and they view those calls as something repugnant to their individual liberty and their inalienable God-given right to self-defense, as seen in Nature. A fairly significant number of them have typically long thought the Republicans were the party that best defended this right, due to the constant assurances from Republican Party leaders and some decent past successes on this front, which now makes it all the more repugnant and reprehensible to hear supposed “conservatives” in high offices speak in a manner that reveals they have no proper originalist constitutional knowledge or understanding of why these rights are sacrosanct and cannot and must not be infringed upon.

Unfortunately, there is an equally significant segment of the American people who are exceedingly ignorant and poorly educated on the reasons they have an Inalienable God-given right to keep and bear arms, and this ignorance has matriculated its way into an ever-growing segment of their appointed and elected officials and Congressmen, who have no real or proper understanding of the Second Amendment from an originalist’s constitutional perspective.

Our Second Amendment states:

“A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a Free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Every Man and Woman Has the ABSOLUTE RIGHT To Carry a Firearm for the RIGHTEOUS & LAWFUL Purpose of Self-Defense, and in as much as the Second Amendment preceded all State carry permits, those permits are illegitimate demands upon all citizens. The Second Amendment was never intended to be squashed via permits, licenses or any tax or fee requirements which represent an infringement.

And even though President Donald J. Trump regularly thumps his chest and declares himself to be the greatest defender of the right to keep and bear arms since General George Washington, the truth from his past statements and his own policy actions as President have revealed the opposite to be true. Trump is basically a big New York liberal “progressive” with authoritarian inclinations and a quick readiness to trample on our Second Amendment rights, especially now that he has so many communists within his administration and actual ignorant “conservatives” who are in his ear and telling him it’s fine.

When we get right down to the brass of the thing, neither party in America today really wants the American people armed and able to resist their authoritarian and totalitarian wishes and commands when they come.

On Tuesday, January 27th 2026, three days after ICE agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis during an anti-ICE “protest”, in response to the shooting, President Trump stated:

“You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. You can’t do that. It’s just a very unfortunate thing.”

This is reminiscent of 2019 when President Trump came out in support of red flag gun law after the Parkland School mass shooting. All America heard President Trump state:

“I have called for Red Flag Laws, also known as Extreme Risk Protection Orders.” – later stating on August 9th 2019 in regard to background checks – “Republicans are going to be great and lead the charge along with Democrats“.

Despite Trump’s bluster and tough talk as a strong defender of the Second Amendment, President Donald Trump is not to be trusted on this issue, since he has a longstanding known propensity towards gun control – favoring bans on semiautomatic rifles and thirty round magazines as recently as 2009 – and has already violated the Second Amendment through his Executive Order that authorized the Department of Justice to regulate bump stocks, which also flies in the face of D.C. vs. Heller [2008], in which the Supreme Court acknowledged that an individual has the right to keep and bear arms of the same sophistication and technological advancement of the U.S. military, because the Second Amendment was written as a measure to ensure American citizens’ rights to arm themselves against any tyrannical government, not to hunt deer.

One should also consider the fact that in October 2025, President Trump and the Trump administration chose to defend gun control instead of the Constitution as they urged the Supreme Court to reject a review of a case raising a serious and valid Second Amendment challenge to the short-barreled rifle provisions of the National Firearms Act – laws with no historical justification and no place in a free society.

In early 2025, President Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to “protect the Second Amendment rights of all Americans“, but filing briefs that defend the government’s power to tax, register, and criminalize the mere possession of constitutionally protected firearms does the exact opposite.

And yet still, Trump appears to waver back and forth on the issue, depending on who he is speaking with and the current political environment. Speaking to the National Rifle Association at their annual conference in Houston in 2022, just days after nineteen students and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas by a gunman, Trump blamed school administrators, not guns, for the murders, and did a little dance for the audience at the end of his speech.

Noted by the Court in 2010 in McDonald vs. City of Chicago:

“The right to keep and bear arms is ‘among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty’.”

With McDonald vs. Chicago, the Court ruled that the Second Amendment was “incorporated”. This legal term placed states and local governments on notice that they must follow the limitations of the Constitution’s 2nd Amendment and could not make laws more restrictive than allowed by the 2nd Amendment, which plainly states “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”.

It’s also worth noting that D.C. vs. Heller also affirmed the right to keep and bear arms as an individual right and not a collective right, but many states still try to infringe on the people’s right to carry their firearms in an unrestricted environment, by demanding background checks, fees, licenses and the taxation of firearms and ammunition. A state cannot impose a license, tax or fee on a Constitutionally protected right – Murdock vs. Pennsylvania [1942] – and require licensing or registration of any Constitutional right, as these things are illegitimate and unconstitutional – Follett vs. Town of McCormick SC – 1944. The only “license” any citizen needs to open carry any handgun of rifle in public is the U.S. Constitution.

Even the Darling of the Left, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan stated in 2010 that the individual’s right to bear arms has “binding precedent” and “is settled law”, during a Supreme Court hearing.

In the aftermath of the Pretti shooting, this makes it all the more troubling to hear so many highly placed people in the Trump administration acting as if this command from our Second Amendment – the Bill of Rights – is somehow optional and something that requires lip service only or the most minimal of adherence up until it become politically inconvenient to obey as servants of the American people.

Alex Pretti was thirty-seven year-old nurse and fringe radical Democrat communist with no criminal record and a valid Minnesota firearm carry permit. He had the absolute right to have that pistol on him under any set of circumstances, even at the protest that was intended to obstruct ICE agents’ immigration enforcement action. He crossed the line when he angrily approached an ICE agent and interfered in his duties to the point that the agent felt compelled to arrest him, but simply having the firearm on him wasn’t reason to shoot and kill him, unless he was reaching for it and the ICE agent felt threatened.

The full details as of yet have not surfaced, although several accounts suggest Pretti’s shooting was accidental and sparked when his Sig Sauer P320 9mm accidentally discharged by itself — something that is known to be a defect in this weapon.

But we all heard Department of Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem state:

“I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign. This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons.”

FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News:

“No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines. You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s simply that simple. You don’t have that right to break the law.”

In an interview with ABC News [‘This Week’], when host Jonathan Karl made mention of the 2nd Amendment, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent smugly replied:

“I’ve been to a protest. Guess what. I didn’t bring a gun. I brought a billboard“.

Well whoop-dee-shit for Bessent. I’ve been to scores of protests on a litany of issues from gun rights to illegal immigration and abortion, and at every damned one of them, while I may or may not have held a sign, I always had my .40 or my rifle and two extra magazines on me – here in Tennessee and other states as well – not from any desire to shoot anyone but rather from a sense of self-preservation after witnessing too many fringe Marxist-Maoist lunatics pull knives and guns on unsuspecting conservative protestors in the past.

On January 20th 2020, myself and nearly a hundred fine and decent American patriots from Tennessee met at the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond in attendance of the Virginia Citizens’ Defense League Lobby Day, to help Virginia’s people protest new tyrannical gun control laws that had been proposed by then-Governor Northam. And believe it or not, we all took our rifles, as did thousands of other patriots from all across America who also participated – even some conservative black gun rights advocates.

It would appear that President Trump and his people have forgotten how he profusely praised seventeen year old Kyle Rittenhouse as the “poster boy” for self-defense after he shot three men, killing two, during the 2020 protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin that turned quickly into a chaotic melee that ran for blocks.

In 2020, Trump also defended Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a St Louis couple who aimed their rifles at protestors moving too close to their home, as he noted, “They were legal weapons“.

Again, just what law is being broken by simply carrying one’s firearm to a protest. The law wasn’t broken until Pretti interfered with the ICE agent. To be sure, assaulting, resisting, or obstructing a federal agent in the commission of his official duties is a felony under 18 U.S.C. 111. Similarly aligned statutes criminalize interference with federal operations. But those laws address conduct – not mere presence, not lawful protest or observation, and not the legal carrying of a firearm under state or federal law.

In the Trump administration, President Trump and his top Cabinet members seem to hold a version of America where the Bill of Rights is contingent on situational events and is some sort of proposition controlled by Government Agents whereby one can either have one’s First Amendment Rights or one’s Second Amendment Rights – but if a person attempts to exercise both simultaneously, he might forfeit his right to life.

For many long decades prior to the turn of the 21st century, conservatives and nearly all Republicans – with the exception of Ronald Reagan who facilitated the Gun Control Movement as Governor of California – treated the right to keep and bear arms as a sacrosanct right. And in recent years, as the Democrat Party Communists and their RINO allies have sought to eradicate our Second Amendment right to carry our firearms everywhere from the local grocery store to the steps of the state capitol and the D.C. Capitol Building. And now that the reins of power are back in what many thought to be safe hands, the Republicans seem to be abandoning the old “come and take them” position in favor of “comply or die”.

However, there were a number of prominent Republicans in the aftermath of the Pretti shooting who did suggest that constitutional limits still apply, even in the midst of tense and contentious law enforcement operations. Representative Thomas Massie wrote:

“Carrying a firearm is not a death sentence. It’s a Constitutionally protected God-given right.”

Simultaneously, some critics expressed concern that focusing on the firearms alone misses the central issue of whether or not the use of deadly force was justified and the fact that we seem to be entering an era where our constitutional rights are being turned into conditional privileges.

No clause in the U.S. Constitution can be interpreted to give Congress, the President, any of the States’ legislatures, any Government agency, or the District of Columbia a power to disarm the people or to control firearms to the point that far too many now aspire. Flagitious attempts to abrogate our Second Amendment Right – God-given – are occurring in plain sight through incremental actions and under a general pretense in blind pursuit of inordinate power. This is what men such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Locke had in mind, when they presented the American people the Second Amendment in order to prevent any abuse of power, preserve the remainder of the Bill of Rights, restrain the federal government and keep America and Americans free.

And in his ‘Commentaries on the Constitution’, Justice Joseph Story considered the right to keep and bear arms as “the palladium of liberties of the republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers …“, which deters tyranny and enables the people to overthrow their government should it prove necessary.

In the ‘Federal Gazette’ on June 18th 1789, Tench Coxe wrote:

“As civil rulers … may attempt to tyrannize … and … might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article [the 2nd Amendment] in their right to keep and bear arms“.

No writer of that era disputed or contradicted Coxe’s analysis that the Second Amendment protected the people’s right to keep and bear their private arms.

Today, Americans witness a broad problem across the entire Trump administration, that calls into question the scope of our Bill of Rights themselves and whether or not they hold in real-life situations when the federal government finds them inconvenient. To abandon the Second Amendment is to abandon America’s founding principles, and it make it look like Trump and company are defending the party over the nation.

Administrations of all stripes come and go, until they decide they won’t, and that’s the primary reason the right to defend one’s self against any overreaching, tyrannical abuse of political power, much as we experienced under the Biden regime, must be permanent.

I cannot speak for anyone else, but should I be unfortunate and live long enough to witness a day and a time when the U.S. government attempts to eradicate this God-given right and confiscate our weapons, they may eventually succeed in taking mine, but not without one long hell of a fight and not before I send a bunch of Government Agents to Hell in a hail of lead. Yes indeed, they absolutely will have to come and pry my rifle from my cold dead hands.

February 1, 2026

~ the Author ~
Justin O. Smith Has Lived in Tennessee Off and on Most of His Adult Life, and Graduated From Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, With a B.S. And a Double Major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – Minors in Military Science and English, for What Its Worth. His Real Education Started From That Point on. Smith Is a Frequent Contributor to the Family of Kettle Moraine Publications.