Case in point: The administration’s response to the killing of Alex Pretti.
This story was originally published on The Contrarian.
The federal government’s siege of Minneapolis led to yet another fatal encounter at the hands of immigration officials last weekend. Real-time video footage captured the deadly shooting of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital—first showing him recording with his phone and helping direct traffic, then attempting to protect a woman who’d been shoved and pepper-sprayed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. Subsequently, the agents pepper-sprayed Pretti and tackled him to the ground, confiscating his legally registered handgun. Other agents fired at him, ten shots, killing him at the scene.
The Contrarian has reported on mistreatment of women and children by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as it becomes clearer by the day that the deep misogyny prevalent across the administration, including but not limited to ICE and CBP, is neither exclusively directed at nor deadly only to women. Their response to the killing of Pretti is case in point.
Like many of us, I have had a hard time processing the elements at play. Among these, I was admittedly caught off guard by the dichotomy of an armed civilian who so decisively moved to protect a woman, as Pretti did. It is not a narrative I’m accustomed to, quite frankly—in part because I have never fully been able to visualize the gun lobby’s elusive promise of “a good guy with a gun” in the public square.
The National Rifle Association (NRA), which has long conjured and codified that ideal, seems also to have experienced whiplash. Along with other gun rights groups, the NRA took umbrage at a federal prosecutor’s post on social media: “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don’t do it!”
Gregory Bovino, top brass at Border Patrol, now booted from duty in Minnesota, similarly triggered the gun rights crowd when he announced to the media that Pretti was poised to do “maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” FBI director Kash Patel told Fox News: “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want.”
We know what we saw in Minneapolis on Saturday morning. We know who was the good guy with a gun and protector of women. Remember: Misogynists hate those men, too.
Of course, these are absurdly hypocritical takes for any true Second Amendment proponent. Perhaps that’s because their own vision of “a good guy with a gun” is suddenly starting to look a little unfamiliar? As reported by NPR, “more liberals, people of color and LGBTQ folks have been buying guns for years and particularly since Trump’s reelection in 2024.” (White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded to this particular NPR story by saying it exactly is why NPR no longer receives federal funding.)
The article was published in November 2025, at which time “every new gun owner who spoke to NPR said they thought it was highly unlikely they would have to defend themselves because of civil unrest. But they also said that if they ever had to, they’d regret not having a gun.” Pretti did not use his gun either. But clearly the entire equation is new territory for all of us.
Guns are arguably about protection, another issue that has Republicans twisted into a gender-fueled knot. Just over a year ago, President Donald Trump signed his first set of executive orders, including one explicitly in service of protecting women—Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government—and hasn’t stopped asserting a so-called protector role ever since (whether we “like it or not”).
Last Friday, hours before Pretti was killed, Vice President JD Vance spoke at an antiabortion rally in Washington, D.C., the annual March for Life, where he proclaimed, “We believe that every country in the world has the duty to protect life.” He leaned further into “protection” as the rationale for the administration’s latest retrenchment of reproductive rights, an expansion of the Global Gag Rule that forbids U.S. assistance to organizations that provide or discuss abortion to cover groups involved in “gender ideology” and diversity, equity and inclusion.
The Fulcrum recently reported on an academic theory called the “protection racket,” in which government purports to offer “protection from an imagined threat to deflect from threat posed by the government itself.” It is a textbook authoritarian ploy, often leveraged to keep women in “subservient roles—and thus effectively in need of some form of protection from others.”
According to University of Denver Professor Hilary Matfess, who co-authored an analysis published by The George Washington University on gender and the Jan. 6 insurrection, the Trump administration is now in full-blown protectionist stance—though not by saying, “ ‘Wow, we should really expand access to prenatal healthcare’ or ‘We need more resources for women that are victims of domestic violence,’ because it is not about protecting women…. It’s about protecting certain men’s ability to wield power and influence under the banner of protection.”
The confluence of gun ownership and protection make the circumstances of Pretti’s final moments even more profound. A beloved son, friend and colleague by all accounts. A man seen on video with calm and determination. A man who placed his own body in harm’s way to shield a woman. The feminist virtues of these attributes left the authoritarian regime with no plausible response. Good guy with a gun? Deny every argument you’ve ever made about the fight for freedom from tyranny. Protector of women? Wreak havoc and pose as the savior.
George Orwell’s famous quote from 1984—“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”—is here and now. We know what we saw in Minneapolis on Saturday morning. We know who was the good guy with a gun and protector of women.
Remember: Misogynists hate those men, too.
On Monday night, the nonprofit Moms First joined several organizations to organize a webinar for nearly 9,000 moms who signed up. I’m sharing here a list of resources provided—concrete ways to support impacted communities in Minnesota and nationally:
Great Job Jennifer Weiss-Wolf & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
