A top gun rights group outright rejected President Donald Trump’s take on the intensive care nurse who was shot dead by immigration agents in Minneapolis.
The National Association for Gun Rights, backed by more than four million members committed to the Second Amendment, bristled against Trump’s argument that 37-year-old Alex Pretti should not have been carrying a gun when he went to observe an immigration operation being carried out in the Twin Cities over the weekend.
Multiple videos of the grisly Saturday shooting showed that Pretti was helping a woman who had been pushed down by a federal agent when a scuffle broke out. The situation quickly escalated into agents firing shots at Pretti.
A preliminary government report, obtained by CBS News, indicated that one agent repeatedly yelled about Pretti having a gun before two officers opened fire. Pretti’s gun was taken by a Border Patrol agent after the shooting, according to the report.
“You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns, you just can’t,” Trump, 79, told reporters as he departed the White House on Tuesday afternoon. “You can’t walk in with guns. You can’t do that.”
“We view that as a very unfortunate incident,” he said later in the day. “Unless you’re a stupid person, very, very unfortunate incident. I don’t like that he had a gun. I don’t like that he had two fully loaded magazines. That’s a lot of bad stuff. And despite that, I say that’s a very unfortunate incident.”
But NARG President Dudley Brown disagreed.
“The president is wrong,” Brown told the Daily Beast. “While you don’t have the right to impede law enforcement, clearly you have every right to carry the tools for self-defense in public.”
Administration officials were quick to argue that Pretti had it coming by being armed, even though Minneapolis police confirmed that he had a legal permit to carry.
“While Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, Americans do not have a constitutional right to impede lawful immigration enforcement operations,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday. “And any gun owner knows that when you are carrying a weapon, when you are bearing arms and you are confronted by law enforcement, you are raising the assumption of risk and the risk of force being used against you.”
FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News on Sunday that “you cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Saturday that she didn’t “know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.”
Brown didn’t mince words in responding to Trump officials.
“The comments that his administration made on Saturday and Sunday were ludicrous, absolutely ridiculous,” he said, adding that the remarks sounded more like they came from the Obama administration.
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on Brown’s remarks.
The National Rifle Association, for its part, said it “unequivocally believes that all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be.”
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