State of Tuesday: WHAT KILLED PRETTI GOOD
No sober-minded person with any sense about them gets in a physical altercation with federal police
Greetings, Dear Reader,
As promised, today we’re getting to the bottom of it.
WHAT KILLED PRETTI GOOD
I can relate to Alex Pretti.
I got my concealed carry permit a few months ago. I live near a city (Washington, D.C.) that recently had a rapidly worsening crime problem until Trump basically solved it. Militant leftists have also doxxed me as a result of my job no fewer than twice in the past five years.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that in some urban and academic jurisdictions, it’s pretty much legal to assault and destroy the property of conservatives, as long as you’re loudly liberal while you do it. Also, if you’re loudly black or illegal, you can get a slap on the wrist for just about anything in a city these days. Murder. Robbery. Rape.
The crimes they’re willing to overlook if you’re the right kind of person are without limit.
It’s been years of this, more than a decade really. Liberals had a monopoly on summary acts of extrajudicial violence, on selectively lenient sentencing, and on the ability to render you financially and socially destitute if you dared speak up. They used it frequently. They even looked the other way as their civilian paramilitary burned down businesses, destroyed entire towns, and even took over governance of city blocks in the gayest series of mini-secessions in American history (the ghosts of southern gentlemen roll).
The latter of these banned police from cruising those city blocks and also resulted in some rapes and murders, because that’s what happens when you ban police. Meanwhile, local Democrat officials and national media inversely referred to the destructive militant block party as “the Summer of Love.”
The general permissiveness of America started to recede when attempts were made on Trump’s life and so many normals openly said, literally on camera, it would have been better if the shooters hadn’t missed. Then it really broke when Kirk was shot and a deranged flood of open happiness and joy came from people we expect to steward some of the public’s most vulnerable people: the elderly, the infirm, and children.
Suddenly that storied shoe was on the right’s foot. People were getting fired, their livelihoods ripped away. The left shrieked about free speech, but many of those bearing the brunt had public assumptions of trust and power over politically diverse people. Certainly rejoicing in someone’s death because of widely held wrongthink broke that compact.
Many who once wielded the cancel stick bit the dust. Professors, administrators, public school teachers, doctors and nurses.
Pretti was a nurse at a VA hospital. (A real-life Greg Focker.)
Who could blame Pretti for gearing up in a city like Minneapolis? I certainly couldn’t. The city police force never really recovered from the George Floyd unrest (in which Pretti took part, according to his family). Many politicians openly supported destroying the police. Crime got significantly worse as a result. Pretti did exactly what I would have done in that context: he armed himself.
What I wouldn’t have done, however, is gotten in a physical confrontation that wasn’t already life or death. When you’re armed, getting in a shoving match over who was in line first at the movie theater is a recipe for disaster. Physical altercations of all varieties should be avoided unless avoiding them is almost certain to result in death or severe, irreversible harm. In other words, unless you really have no other choice.
That’s otherwise what you are introducing to the scenario when you’re carrying a gun — death or sudden irreversible harm — so it better be an attempt to prevent at least that much.
I’m not going to frame-by-frame the video of Alex Pretti getting shot. A group of federal law enforcement officers killed him, clear as day.
The situation was chaotic and tragic and what many LEOs would refer to as a “bad shoot,” but it wasn’t criminal on anyone’s part except literally Alex Pretti, who stuck himself between an officer and his arrest while carrying a gun.
That’s a crime, by the way, obstruction, and as he was subsequently being subdued, they discovered the gun. They shouted “gun!” And in the midst of the struggle, which attracted nearly half a dozen officers, one grabbed the sidearm, took a single step to get away, and it discharged into the ground.
(People are saying that particular handgun model is plagued with a negligent discharge design flaw, and they aren’t wrong. Pretti was pretty likely to shoot himself at some point.)
Now, one thing I will rightly admit is that corrupt cops certainly exist. They’ll certainly do whatever it takes to stay out of prison, including lie, tamper with evidence, and so on. There’s a reason the push to end qualified immunity actually had legs and it’s not just mentally ill leftism. We’ve all experienced powertripping police at one time or another. Now imagine if one of them, a beloved member of a local force, actually killed someone?
So I can at least understand the push. That’s also not really what’s at stake in the Pretti shooting, which was filmed from about six angles and happened in broad daylight and plain view of the public.
Open gunfire in a city is just about the worst thing a law enforcement officer can encounter. There are people everywhere. There will almost certainly be collateral if it continues. They are, in fact, charged with protecting the public. Some of them, I would say the stark majority, take that charge very seriously.
“Gun!” they heard, then the sound of a round discharging and bouncing off the pavement.
So they reared back and perforated Alex Pretti until he was dead.
It’s a tragic, shitty accident. It’s highly unlikely to result in criminal charges.
The dazzling reality most leftists will have to accept in the cases of both Pretti and Good is that they actually do not have the monopoly on violence and criminal justice they’ve been propagandized to believe. It is not morally justified to pray for Trump’s assassination. It is not morally justified to celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death. Finally, it is not morally justified to intervene when law enforcement officers are trying to make an arrest. Bad things will almost certainly happen if you do, most especially while carrying a gun (or flooring the gas).
In America, we allow courts and juries to adjudicate whether a citizen was rightly or wrongly booked. We did so for Daniel Penny. We could have done likewise for the woman leftists now insist that Pretti was attempting to “help.”
What’s oddly ironic about the whole mess is Pretti was part of a group demanding “due process” for illegal aliens, but they’ll self-righteously and even physically intervene when that process starts, i.e., with an arrest.
No sober-minded person with any sense about them gets in a physical altercation with federal police, in a highly contentious public setting, while carrying a gun.
What really killed Alex Pretti was the prevailing leftist delusion.
A self-reinforcing feedback loop of praise for rightthink, main character syndrome, and leftist moralizing. Like Renee Good before him, the idea that chasing, harassing, and even physically resisting armed federal officers could result in their own deaths never crossed their minds.
All that exists is the resulting head pats from their friend groups.
You did good, Alex, sticking up for that lady. Tell me about how you were maced by ICE, Alex. You’re so brave.
You brought a gun to the ICE protest, oh my gosh, Alex, that’s wild!
Now that he’s dead, any actual grieving has been subsumed by the left’s morally depraved grievance. FaceTuned replications of Alex Pretti that aren’t actually Alex Pretti but some prettified version of him have become both digital and real-life murals. Politicians who don’t give a damn about him are using his cadaverous void as a punchline in 30-second hits on CNN. Liberals eulogize him on Facebook for likes from friends and relatives.
It’s all so empty and sad.
Regardless, I’ll be praying for his family, Dear Reader, and you should too.
That’s it for the free portion of today’s State of the Day.
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