If the modern Republican Party has ever faithfully believed in anything, it is in the absolute right for Americans to carry guns – guns of any size, in virtually every situation, and in every circumstance.
Republicans have solidly stood by unfettered gun ownership in the wake of dozens of school shootings and mass slayings, including at churches and synagogues. To a man, they defended guns even after 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse went out armed during protests in 2020 and shot three men, killing two of them.
To Republicans, the mantra is clear: guns are never to blame. Until now. Donald Trump, Maga, and the entire party have been scrambling for a response to the killing of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents on the streets of Minneapolis.
At first, Trump’s team tried their usual playbook of slandering the victim and lying about the circumstances of his death. They claimed Pretti had been planning to “massacre” federal agents. They said he had drawn his gun, or at least reached for it. They tried to paint Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse working at a hospital for veterans, as a left-wing extremist.
None of this worked because there was video, which was extremely clear, and which travelled well beyond the usual circles of people who follow the news. Even in the era of the “filter bubble”, footage as shocking as this proved it could still travel and reach normal Americans who do not fixate on politics.
And the footage showed that Pretti had been holding a camera phone, not a gun, when he was tackled by agents. It showed that one of those agents had disarmed him of the gun which he was legally carrying. And then it showed that at least two of those agents shot him several times in the back, while he was pinned to the ground and disarmed.
That left Trump and his team scrambling to find any way to excuse the inexcusable – and in his desperation, Trump landed on blaming the gun. In a series of remarks over the course of the day, the US President said that “you can’t have guns, you can’t walk in with guns”, that “I don’t like that he had a gun, I don’t like that he had two fully loaded magazines, that’s a lot of bad stuff” – though he added the death was still “very unfortunate” – and that “he shouldn’t have been carrying a gun”.
These remarks would be career-ending for any other American politician, especially in the Republican Party. America’s National Rifle Association (NRA) – the most powerful organisation in the gun lobby – aggressively scores politicians on their stance on “gun rights”, funding those who support unrestricted gun ownership, and doing everything in its power to oppose those who would restrict the right to carry weapons in all circumstances.
Trump and his movement turned Rittenhouse into a hero. Trump pardoned people who turned up to the 6 January protests armed with knives and stun guns, and went on to invade America’s Capitol building itself. To an outside observer, it is fairly obvious that Trump is just engaging in his usual hypocrisy – what he is really saying here is that only his supporters should be able to carry guns.
But that is not what Trump is actually saying, and in the bizarre world of Republican politics, he has hit on one of the few issues that could genuinely divide the Maga base. Trump and several of his top officials have suggested that legally carrying a gun could serve as grounds for federal agents to shoot and kill you.
This is the stuff of the NRA’s nightmares, along with those of every right-wing prepper, Alex Jones listener, and many of the groupings of men that make up Trump’s support. Trump was already facing a schism within his own supporters over the actions of the US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis. His panicked response has opened up further divisions in his base.
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Republicans don’t need to worry about fanatical gun owners switching parties and voting Democrat – at least not in most cases. But Trump’s 2024 victory came in large part because people who usually don’t bother to vote broke that habit and came out to cast their ballots for him. If Trump upsets voters like that over gun rights, they will stay home – which could spell disaster for Republicans in this year’s midterms.
On one level, Trump was just doing something transparent and venal. He was trying to blame Pretti for his own death, using the fact he was carrying a gun to do this, and hoping his supporters would spot that he was only suggesting that people who oppose Trump shouldn’t carry guns.
But in his desperation, he has crossed one of his party’s few remaining red lines. Trump’s problems are mounting – and so far, his usual tricks are only making things worse.
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