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In the aftermath of the January 24 shooting of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as he physically interfered with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents trying to apprehend a criminal illegal alien, some high-level Trump Administration officials made some very questionable statements about firearms and concealed carry.
Now, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is trying to limit the damage of those statements.
On January 25, the day after the shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that Pretty should not have come armed to the protest and that “this individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism. That’s the facts.”
Later, FBI Director Kash Patel made similar, but even more egregious, remarks to Fox News.
“You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protests that you want,” Patel said. “It’s that simple.”
Apparently, the backlash from gun-rights proponents over those statements sent the Trump Administration into damage control, prompting the remarks by Leavitt.
President Trump “absolutely” supports the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.
“While Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, Americans do not have a constitutional right to impede lawful immigration enforcement operations,” she said.
That statement is true. But it didn’t exactly address the statements by Noem and Patel that Pretti had no right to carry a gun at the time of the shooting. In fact, he had a Minnesota concealed carry permit. And since state permits are unconstitutional anyway, even if he hadn’t have one he still had the right to carry a firearm as protected by the Second Amendment.
The seemingly anti-gun statements from administration officials drew the ire of several gun-rights organizations, including the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC).
“There is no question that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to carry a gun outside the home for self-defense—including at protests,” FPC wrote in a released statement. “And people morally exercising their constitutionally protected natural rights do not obstruct justice. To be sure, no justice can exist without the ability of the People to exercise those rights in the first place.
Ultimately, while the Trump Administration has done much to help secure Second Amendment rights during the first year of the president’s second term, that doesn’t mean gun-rights groups will blindly support the administration when it turns against the right to keep and bear arms.
“President Trump and his Administration—much like the anti-carry states we fight every day—must remember that government exists only by the consent of the governed, and that our rights are not subordinate to their policy preferences,” the FPC statement concluded. “As President Trump learned in his first term, FPC will strongly oppose and fight any attempt to treat the right to bear arms as a government-granted privilege—regardless of who or where it comes from.”
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