The death of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis is opening a new fault line between President Donald Trump and his conservative base as gun rights groups denounce what they say are a series of anti-Second Amendment statements justifying the shooting.
The Trump administration has faced withering GOP criticism after officials argued that Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, presented a threat to immigration agents because he brought a lawfully obtained firearm to an ICE protest.
“We have talked to a number of people in the administration and asked them, WTF?” said Dudley Brown, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights.
Bystander footage of the shooting appears to show Pretti’s gun was not visible or drawn at a Saturday protest on the streets of Minneapolis and that an agent removed the weapon before the series of shots that killed him.
But the early response from the administration has been to claim that Pretti was brandishing the weapon, while FBI Director Kash Patel went so far as to suggest the presence of a gun at a rally could be evidence of malicious intent.
Brown called it “flabbergastingly stupid” that Patel would bring up the magazines Pretti allegedly had on his person, arguing it was common to carry extra rounds, and suggested the administration was holding him to a different standard because he was protesting a Republican president.
“Do you have the right to self-defense in public while you’re practicing your First Amendment? Absolutely,” Brown said. “And there should be no political test, whether it’s right or left.”
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The administration’s handling of the shooting has sparked a rare break between the White House and congressional Republicans, many of whom have called for oversight and an “objective” investigation.
But the White House is also risking a wider fracture over an issue that rarely polarizes the GOP. Gun rights groups are not only contesting what they see as misrepresented facts — they are also raising concern that the administration is setting a standard for firearm owners that runs counter to the Second Amendment and decades of GOP orthodoxy.
The organizations have focused, in particular, on comments by Bill Essayli, a federal prosecutor and Trump ally who said that “if you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.”
Organizations from Gun Owners of America to the NRA released statements over the weekend calling his words “untoward” and “dangerous and wrong.”
The dispute is part of a larger series of cracks between Trump and the coalition that helped propel him to a second term in the White House. The shooting comes days after anti-abortion groups pressed the president to take more steps to limit access at the federal level, including the banning of mifepristone.
Trump has also invited controversy from the MAGA base over his reluctance to release the Epstein files, as well as a series of military strikes that critics say betray his commitment to an “America First” foreign policy agenda.
Some within the Trump administration have attempted to soften the rhetoric over Pretti’s death, with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche acknowledging on Sunday that Pretti had a concealed carry permit and, according to Minneapolis police, was “lawfully armed.”
And in a return of goodwill, Gun Owners of America praised him for withholding judgment on the facts of the case.
Still, the Pretti shooting is rekindling a skepticism within the gun rights movement that dates back to Trump’s first term in office.
His administration has generally taken a pro-gun-rights stance over the last year, suing the D.C. government over its ban on semi-automatic weapons and repealing a tax on short-barreled rifles and shotguns as part of the president’s Big Beautiful Bill Act. But many activists remember Trump’s support for “red flag” laws and a ban on bump stocks that came after a mass shooting in Las Vegas.
“One of the worst Second Amendment stances for gun owners of a Republican administration in American history,” Brown said. “I mean, there was nowhere to go but up.”
Asked about the concerns on Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump is the Second Amendment’s greatest “defender” but that the right to bear arms does not mean “a constitutional right to impede lawful immigration enforcement operations.”
“Any gun owner knows that when you are carrying a weapon, when you are bearing arms, and you are confronted by law enforcement, you are raising the assumption of risk and the risk of force being used against you,” Leavitt told reporters. “And again, that’s unfortunately what took place on Saturday.”
Her remarks come as activists in the gun rights movement urge the White House to focus narrowly on Pretti’s conduct, rather than the Second Amendment implications.
“Either get the language right or stop doing press,” said Dana Loesch, a former spokeswoman for the NRA.
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She and other conservatives have taken particular offense at Patel’s comment that “no one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines.”
“Oh, yeah? So tell that to Kyle Rittenhouse,” said Brown, referring to the man who shot and killed two men at a protest and injured another in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. At the time, Republicans widely defended his conduct as a matter of self-defense.