Your Second Amendment Rights Do Not Exist
The recent killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti is yet another example of the illusionary reality of a right many Americans have been raised to understand as being inalienable.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
- The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America
I was a child when I was first handed a firearm. Like many Americans, particularly those of us from the Midwest, the presence of weapons was seemingly ever-present. My father, a staunch Conservative and member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), was quick to teach me the fundamentals of firearm safety and storage, no doubt in part due to their presence in our home. My sister and I were made to sit in front of our family’s television to watch the comedic NRA youth mascot, Eddie Eagle, fly across the screen and speak about the dos and don’ts of firearm handling.
I’ll never forget how excited my father was when he gifted me with a .22 bolt-action rifle with a light brown wooden stock that had been handed down from his father to him. It was a weapon I came to love as I grew older and got more comfortable with it. What at first seemed like a heavy, oversized rifle became easier to handle with every year that passed. I became accustomed to the loud crack that resonated from the barrel when I pulled the trigger, overcoming the urge to flinch and close my eyes. My shot grouping got tighter, and the range I could accurately strike a target increased as I became more proficient.
It was not long before my father allowed me to shift from rifles to shotguns, gifting me with a 20-gauge Remington 870 Express. It felt different and certainly had a much more significant recoil than the small rifle I was accustomed to, but I quickly became at least comfortable enough to hit a target. My proficiency quickly increased as I shifted from the range to the outdoors, spending years hunting alongside my father and his friends for a variety of animals, including rabbits, squirrels, doves, turkeys, pheasants, quail, ducks, and deer.
Truthfully, I loved every moment of it, even if I complained about wading through chest-high, bone-chilling water on my way to a duck blind, the summer sun bearing down on my face as I tried to hit fast-moving doves flying overhead, the early mornings that saw me waking up and preparing before the sun rose, and other realities of hunting, it was something I grew to appreciate, especially given that I was able to eat what I brought home at day’s end.
Needless to say, being a firearm owner and hunter shaped the way I engaged with the question of firearm regulations and laws. I was taught from a young age that the right to bear arms was an inalienable right that helped the people protect themselves from a tyrannical government. Firearms were an integral part of what I understood to be the “American” way of life. As such, the idea of infringing on that right, even in the name of common-sense reform, was uncomfortable to me.
As I grew older and consciously shifted from a Conservative to a Democrat, my positions on gun control shifted as well. I came to embrace the concepts of background checks, magazine and bump stock bans, waiting periods, and other legislation that tried to mitigate a gun violence epidemic in the nation. What my father saw as an infringement of a right, I saw as a modification. I stopped hunting, stopped asking to go to the range, and went years without touching any of the firearms I had grown up with.
As it so happened, however, my political development did not stop when I became. Democrat. Experiences during my time in university shifted my perspective once again, and I became a communist (the only one in my family). I read about the experiences of the Palestinian people, whose campaign of armed struggle had helped stave off annihilation at the hands of their colonial occupiers. I learned about the Black Panther Party and their police patrols, whereby they followed police officers in their community while armed to keep them from enacting violence against the Black community.
Critically, I also learned about the reaction of then-California Governor Ronald Reagan, who pushed for gun control efforts as a response to armed Black political organizations exercising their constitutional rights. As I came to find, the Second Amendment was hardly an inalienable right in the span of U.S. history. What was framed as a God-given right bestowed upon all citizens was, in practice, a right that was only “inalienable” for a very narrow group.
What was framed as a “right to bear arms” through history, oftentimes was a right to engage in armed violence against those the state deemed “undesirable". Indigenous communities were decimated in campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing waged by settlers who desired their land, settlers who cited self-defense when Indigenous people inevitably rose up and resisted their efforts to encroach upon territory they had no right to. Black communities were terrorized at the barrel of a gun, enduring generations of slavery, only to be demonized whenever they took up arms in attempts at liberation. Even upon supposed “liberation,” Black communities faced the realities of both state violence and the horrors of non-state actors, including those of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
It seemed that, ultimately, the Second Amendment, as it was intended, was an attempt at maintaining a deeply racist, white supremacist sociopolitical hierarchy. As the state advanced the interests of capital, this also meant the maintenance of a very specific class hierarchy. Workers who armed themselves to fight for better lives, like those who participated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, were met with harsh violence by a state that had no interests beyond those of their bosses.
To that end, it did not mean that the ownership of firearms itself was inherently the same as what was intended in the Second Amendment. I looked at the examples of John Brown, who led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an effort to wage a slave revolt, and Communist Party members in Alabama who found themselves engaged in firefights with the KKK alongside Black sharecroppers, and other examples of people using arms to fight for a better world. It was around that time that I came across an 1850 speech titled “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote a phrase many on the Left have come to know well:
“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”
That ideological development brought me back to the range, but with a new view on what the rights we held really were. If one were to challenge capital, to challenge white supremacy, to challenge the status quo, they had no rights at all. That reality was made apparent yet again when Department of Homeland Security officials executed Minneapolis nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti in broad daylight. DHS was quick to release a statement that looked remarkably similar to their statement regarding the execution of Renee Nicole Good, claiming that he intended to harm DHS officers, requiring them to fire in “self-defense.” Alex’s “crime”, it seemed, was legally carrying a concealed weapon.
At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here.
The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming.
Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.
The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.
About 200 rioters arrived at the scene and began to obstruct and assault law enforcement on the scene, crowd control measures were deployed for the safety of the public and law enforcement.
This situation is evolving, and more information is forthcoming.
It must be stated that Alex had every right to conceal carry, and his paperwork was in order at the time of his murder. He had followed the law to the letter. Videos of the incident showed clearly that he had not drawn the firearm either, even as around half a dozen DHS agents threw him to the ground and assaulted him for standing between them and a woman they were pepper-spraying at point-blank range. One officer removed his firearm from the holster, and within a second, another began firing what became a volley of upwards of twelve shots.
To DHS, however, all that mattered was that he was in the proximity of their officers with a legally obtained, legally carried weapon. That made him a threat worthy of being executed in the street. Upon seeing the video, I was, like many, shocked. His murder mirrored in some ways the murder of Philando Castile, who was shot by a police officer at a traffic stop in 2016 after the officer escalated, knowing he had a firearm (also legally obtained and carried). Castile’s murder was entirely unjustifiable, as was Pretti’s. In both cases, their exercising a supposedly inalienable right evaporated in the blink of an eye as soon as it was convenient for the state.
Both of these murders were heavily politicized, with many on the right, so-called “Second Amendment” supporters championing the executioners. To some, that may seem like a contradiction, but for those who understand who the Second Amendment was truly intended for, it makes perfect sense. Nonetheless, it forces those of us who do not wish to maintain capitalism and white supremacy, who own or wish to own firearms, to reckon with the reality of a system that wishes us killed and our rights stripped away. For us, there is no Second Amendment.
For those gunowners who are looking at the current out groups thinking “I do not care, this is not my problem”, one must consider that it one day could be. It is folly of those in the gun owning community who are not white supremacists to look at these murders, these executions, and not realize that their rights and by extension lives could very well be on the chopping block in the not so distant future. A threat to one is a threat to all, after all.
The rights of those who challenge the status quo are far from inalienable. The ease with which they can be revoked is meant to be a threat against those who may begin questioning the system itself. It requires us to move beyond an analysis that champions these supposed rights and points to them in an attempt to give them legitimacy. The system, and all of its laws and supposed freedoms, will not protect or save us from the violence of a state and its acolytes. Only we can keep ourselves safe.
As george carlin said "you don't have rights, you have privileges".
This was a terrible and horrific tragedy. The home of the free no longer it seems. Gun toting goons reminiscent of the Brown Shirts killing the American dream. Sure there were far more deportations under the Obama administration but the methods were lawful and respectful by comparison.
However, before you get too carried away with your ideology, just remember communist regimes have killed more people, usually their own people, than any fascist or right wingers. Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot made Hitler and Franco and Mussolini and Pinochet seem like amateurs. Communist nutters have probably knocked off over 100 million people in the name of their revolutions or ideals. Only microbes can boast more lives. Extreme views on both ends of the spectrum all end up using violence at some point.
With respect,
A Sceptic