The excruciating fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and intensive care nurse, at the hands of federal agents on January 24, has thrust into public consciousness the intersection of gun carrying and public demonstrations.
While many details of the encounter are still murky, Pretti was lawfully carrying a handgun at a public demonstration but did not deploy or display the weapon. From cellphone footage and eyewitness accounts, after being pepper sprayed and wrestled to the pavement, an agent appears to have retrieved Pretti’s gun. About a second later, agent gunfire erupted, with 10 shots fired in less than five seconds. Pretti died at the scene. To be clear, none of this is to suggest that Alex Pretti deserved his fate for lawfully carrying a gun.
He absolutely did not.
Yet almost immediately after the shooting, FBI director Kash Patel said “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.” President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, all criticized Pretti for carrying a gun to a public demonstration.
Gun groups immediately took issue with the comments, including the National Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America, which said that the Second Amendment “protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting.”
This fraught political moment has thus found the Trump administration in the uncomfortable position of taking criticism from both liberals who blame heavy-handed federal agent tactics and conservatives who bristle at the administration’s seeming abandonment of public gun carry rights.
On the one hand, civilian gun carry is indeed a right under the Second Amendment according to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Bruen case where the high court said that individuals have a “right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” The court proposed no exception for doing so in a public gathering.
On the other hand, the consequences of such action are clear. Public gun carrying, especially in the context of a public demonstration or similar gathering is, no matter the intentions of the carrier, a terrible idea.
Even though most of those who acquire guns for self-defense say that they feel safer having them, when the public is polled on the matter, the response is fear. For example, when asked in a Gallup poll how safe they would feel in a “public place” that allowed the concealed carry of firearms, 65% of the public said less safe, 25% more safe, and 8% no difference.When asked who they thought should be allowed to carry concealed firearms in a public place, 44% said only “safety officials,” 26% said only those with a “clear need,” and 27% said private citizens.
Public impressions aside, numerous studies spanning disciplines from psychology to criminology make clear that the presence of guns in the presence of others inflames aggression and makes violence more, not less, likely. For example, a study of over 30,000 public demonstrations from 2020 to 2021 found that violence was more than six times more likely to break out when guns were present.
A study from Stanford University of four decades of data found that states that adopted more liberal gun carry laws, and therefore more civilian gun carrying, saw an increase in violent crime of from 13% to 15%. Numerous studies of states that have adopted broad “stand your ground” laws (meaning that people when confronted with a perceived threat in public had no duty to retreat) and that also have liberal gun carry policies have seen significantly higher rates of gun killings. A study of intimate partner violence found that such violence was three times more likely when guns were present. In short, more guns lead to more crime.
Finally, the link between civilian gun carrying in society and mayhem was well understood by our ancestors. From the 1600s to the start of the twentieth century, every state in the country enacted laws that restricted concealed weapons carrying, and three-fourths of the states had laws restricting open weapons carrying.
The Supreme Court has carved out a new right pertaining to gun carrying.
But that does not make it a good idea. The slogan that “an armed society is a polite society” is both wrong and inimical to public safety.
