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In the days since Alex Pretti was shot to death by federal agents in Minnesota, Republican administration officials have been deploying torturous logic to defend the agents responsible and villainize the 37-year-old ICU nurse. Pretti had a gun when he encountered law enforcement on Saturday—which he was legally permitted to have in accordance with Minnesota law—and suddenly the Trump administration has decided the Second Amendment has exceptions. Seeming to lay some blame on Pretti for his killing, President Donald Trump told the press on Tuesday, “You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t. You can’t walk in with guns. You can’t do that.”

This had already been a theme from his administration. Shortly after the incident, FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News that Americans cannot bring a gun to just “any sort of protest that you want,” while Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino went on CNN to say that Pretti’s Second Amendment rights “don’t count” because, in Bovino’s view, he was obstructing law enforcement officers. It’s worth noting that these positions stand in stark contrast to previous ones by some of these figures, including Patel, who described Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal for homicide after shooting someone at a protest a “victory for the Second Amendment.” Indeed, it did not take long for the reckoning, with far-right figures, the National Rifle Association, and scores of other gun rights groups publicly calling out the Trump administration for this apparent reversal.

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“I’ve encountered countless police while I’ve been armed, and never been shot. The presence of a firearm, by itself, is not an indicator of a criminal intent or a threat to law enforcement,” said Cam Edwards , a prominent gun rights activist and host of the Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co podcast. Tim Pool, a virulent ring-wing conspiracy theorist, noted that video........

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