Did Alex Pretti deserve to die? Probably not, based on what I've seen. It may turn out to be a case of "lawful but awful" here, but he wasn't actually trying to shoot anyone.
But the Left keeps trying to compare the response to Pretti with Rittenhouse, and the two are vastly different.
See, Kyle Rittenhouse was attacked by a mob and defended himself. Alex Pretti was part of a mob that was, as a group, trying to interfere with federal agents and put his hand on one of those agents. Then he opted not to cooperate during his arrest, which just set the stage for what followed.
But for at least one op-ed writer, the differences might as well be non-existent:
It seems both stories share a common theme: the right to have a gun in a legally ambiguous situation. At the time, neither Rittenhouse nor Pretti was known to be carrying their gun illegally. Instead, Republican lawmakers saw two cases where a gun was present on the victim of a crime and concluded that one was in the right to have the weapon and the other was at fault for it.
To remain consistent, Republican lawmakers, including the Trump Administration, would need to uphold the right to bear arms in the way both Rittenhouse and Pretti did, or be against armament at protests. It cannot be both.
So why are the messages inconsistent on such similar stories? It isn't because of guns. In fact, as mentioned earlier, the guns are just the middleman.
In the first case, the right-wing response was trying to push an anti-rioting narrative, since Rittenhouse was there to protect private property. Against Pretti, the right-wing response was in favor of ICE agents because they were there under the federal order of Donald Trump.
In both cases, the nature of gun rights was not relevant. In fact, gun rights appear secondary to the broader political narratives at play. Instead, they used the guns to promote the pre-existing political ideology that they found would work best as pro-property rights and pro-immigration enforcement.
Now, I've taken issue with the Trump administration's response to Pretti being armed. I find it incredibly problematic, to say the least.
However, comparing these cases and calling them similar because of a "common theme" that is only a common theme if you squint, is disengenuous, at best.
Pretti was carrying a gun at a protest where the intent was to interfere with federal law enforcement, making his decision to carry a gun that day look more suspect than it might otherwise. On the flip side, Rittenhouse was part of an effort intending to protect private property after days of violent rioting when a mob decided to start chasing him.
Rittenhouse immediately tried to surrender to the police when they arrived, while Pretti was resisting arrest.
Rittenhouse's gun wasn't a surprise to anyone, as it was openly carried, and so they didn't have a surprising discovery that put people more on edge, while Pretti's was concealed, thus creating that surprise in a tense situation.
Oh, and while Rittenhouse was responding to a mob trying to murder him, Pretti put his hands on a federal agent during an attempt to interfere with the enforcement of federal law.
The writer tries to make the claim that Republicans aren't as pro-gun as they like to think, and that's fair. This year has already shown that to be shockingly true, but he's also painting the Rittenhouse and Pretti cases as far more similar than they are to try to make a point. After all, he downplays facts in Rittenhouse's case to make it sound worse, while downplaying some in Pretti's case to make him seem more sympathetic. He's just playing the same tribal games he's apparently claiming to denounce.
The two cases are very different. If you want to just harp on how Trump said nothing about Rittenhouse having a gun, then fine. That's fair game.
Pretending these are similar cases is just plain stupid.
After all, Rittenhouse exposed the Left badly. I mean, he shot three people with four shots. Two child predators and a convicted felon just happened to be part of a mob of rioters. Weird, that.
