Alex Pretti’s killing at the hands of federal agents last week is an American tragedy. It has also exposed the fallacies and fault lines that shape how Americans live with widespread access to guns.

Put simply, the Supreme Court has handed down two irreconcilable lines of precedent over the past 20 years. The first is that Americans have a sacred constitutional right to carry guns in public. The second is that that police officers can kill people carrying guns in public with little risk of facing any legal consequences for doing so.

In 2008, the court first held that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms. The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, involved a man who wanted to keep a fully assembled handgun in his home for self-defense, which was prohibited by D.C. law at the time. In a 5–4 ruling, the court’s conservative justices sided with him.

“The enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court, referring to concerns by D.C. and other parties that the ruling would fuel gun violence. “These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”

The Supreme Court revisited the Second Amendment in 2022 to strike down New York’s restrictive law on issuing concealed-carry permits. It marked the first time that the high court had directly addressed the Second Amendment’s scope outside the home. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, took an expansive view of it.

“This definition of ‘bear’ naturally encompasses public carry,” he explained. “Most gun owners do not wear a holstered pistol at their hip in their bedroom or while sitting at the dinner table. Although individuals often ‘keep’ firearms in their home, at the ready for self-defense, most do not ‘bear’ (i.e., carry) them in the home beyond moments of actual confrontation. To confine the right to ‘bear’ arms to the home would nullify half of the Second Amendment’s operative protections.”

Later this year, the Supreme Court is poised to rule on the lengths that states can go when restricting gun ownership in public. Wolford v. Lopez involves a Hawaii law that forbids gun owners from bringing firearms on private property accessible to the public—restaurants, stores, gas stations, and so on—without the property owner’s explicit permission. Most other states allow gun owners to carry their weapons in those locations unless the property owner explicitly says otherwise.

Gun rights advocates have warned that the default-property rule, as the state calls it, would make it nearly impossible to carry a gun in Hawaii since most businesses would refuse consent. That argument appears to have persuaded most of the conservative justices at oral argument earlier this month. At one point, Justice Samuel Alito chastised a lawyer arguing for the state of Hawaii for allegedly trying to turn the Second Amendment into a “second-class right.”

Running parallel to these rulings, however, is a consistent signal from the Supreme Court that law enforcement officials can kill people who pose a personal risk to them largely without risk of legal consequences.

A federal law known as Section 1983 allows people to sue state and local officials for violating their federal constitutional rights. Since the 1960s, the Supreme Court has substantially narrowed Section 1983 claims by inventing the doctrine of “qualified immunity.” In general terms, officers are only liable if their conduct violates a “clearly established right,” which can be interpreted with great particularity and narrowness by lower courts.

These hurdles are often highest in police use-of-force cases. As one justice wrote in a 1986 case, qualified immunity “provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those........

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