A Better Approach to the Firearms Law Dispute

National Review Online

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

The Trump administration has announced that it does not intend to file an appeal in the case of Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF (consolidated with Jensen v. ATF). At stake in that litigation was whether the federal government is constitutionally permitted to require that those who obtain suppressors, short-barreled rifles (SBRs), and short-barreled shotguns (SBSs) must first register them with the ATF. Since 1934, that has been the law of the land. As of this week, it is not — for some Americans, at least. What happens next? Nobody is quite sure.

 

The court’s reasoning is thoroughly persuasive, and we will shed no tears over the weakening of some of the NFA’s least defensible elements. But this case has played out in a way that undermines the stability and predictability of the law. The best course now is for the Trump administration to appeal the decision so that a higher court can affirm that ruling more definitively.

 

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas’s ruling rests upon a change to the law that Congress made last year. Since 1934, those who have taken possession of suppressors, SBRs, and SBSs have been obliged to pay — and to prove that they had paid — a $200 tax. In 2025, however, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” zeroed out that tax. That zeroing out presented the federal government with a serious problem. Historically, the registration requirements in the NFA had been constitutionally justified under Congress’s power to tax. In 1937, for example, in Sonzinsky v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the $200 registration fee on the ground that, “as it is not attended by an offensive regulation, and since it operates as a tax, it is within the national taxing power.” But since 2025, certain items within the NFA no longer require the $200 registration fee, and, in consequence, the registration requirement is no longer “within the national taxing power.” Because the Constitution grants only a small number of enumerated powers to the federal government, this raised the question of under what power they could plausibly be justified going forward — a question that the District Court concluded had no satisfactory answer.

 

The court’s analysis is sound. Under Supreme Court precedent, an essential feature of a tax is that it produces at least some revenue for the government; a tax set at $0 produces none. As the decision confirms, taxes in other laws cannot be deemed to be part of the same regulatory scheme without handing Congress an impermissible general police power. And, for once, the malleable commerce clause cannot supply a justification, because the NFA’s text, structure, placement in the tax code, and statutory history show that Congress enacted the challenged provisions under the taxing power alone — unlike other federal gun laws that have been expressly tied to interstate commerce. Thus, the Court concluded, those provisions must be struck down.

 

So far, so good. And yet the result of this ruling is not as clear as it would be had it been issued by, say, the Supreme Court. The enforcement prohibition applied “against the Jensen plaintiffs and, where applicable, their members and customers.” In short: Some parts of the NFA have been struck down, in some places, for some people.

 

What should the federal government do in response to this mess? It could, in theory, decline to appeal the ruling and then decline to enforce those parts of the law everywhere, against all people. But, because there is no guarantee that the next administration would follow suit, that approach could yield a situation in which some of America’s most potent gun laws are in force only when a Democrat sits in the White House. That way lies chaos.

 

Nor do conservatives have much to gain from the habit of willfully leaving lower court orders in place. In this case, the policy outcome is salutary. But, as President Trump’s two presidencies have ably shown, the Democrats have far more to gain than the Republicans from treating the edicts of random court — or, more typically, deliberately forum-shopped court — as if they represented final national injunctions. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas is not the Supreme Court, or even the Fifth Circuit. By declining to take the case up the usual jurisprudential ladder — and thereby elevating this decision into something that it is manifestly not — the Trump administration is furthering a trend that, in other circumstances, it has rightly decried.

 

There have, in American history, been a handful of circumstances in which it was acceptable for a federal administration to decline to defend a federal law. This does not rise to that level. The litigation is too new, the court that issued the injunction is too small, the confusion caused by the ruling is too great. Odd as it might seem, the best way for the Trump administration to put this fine ruling on a firmer footing is to challenge it.

Andrew Ross Sorkin Thinks You’re Stupid

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, July 18, 2026

 

In this morning’s DealBook, Andrew Ross Sorkin laments that the House of Representatives has passed a bill, the Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act, that:

 

prevents credit card networks and banks from using a unique merchant category code, or M.C.C., for firearms retailers.

 

Instead, gun dealers must be grouped under broader classifications like “general merchandise” or “sporting goods.”

 

Per Sorkin, this is a problem because it will prevent “common-sense ways the financial industry could help identify suspicious purchasing patterns before mass shootings occur.” He concludes that:

 

The merchant code may be swallowed up by the culture wars. Proponents of banning use of the code say that it’s a step toward a “backdoor gun registry.”

 

The “culture wars”? “Proponents say”? “Suspicious purchasing patterns”? A “step toward a ‘backdoor gun registry”? “Common sense”?

 

My jaw is on the floor. Here is the same Andrew Ross Sorkin, writing in the same newspaper, in the same newsletter, in 2018:

 

Here’s an idea.

 

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?

 

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.

 

PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

 

“We do not believe permitting the sale of firearms on our platform is consistent with our values or in the best interests of our customers,” a spokesman for Square told me.

 

Gosh, I wonder where the House might possibly have got the idea that allowing credit card companies to track gun purchases could present a substantial problem for the right to keep and bear arms! Could it be from Andrew Ross Sorkin, who, just eight years ago, was openly calling for that system to be implemented so that those same credit card processors could “set new rules for the sales of guns in America” — rules that would, he hoped, go as far as completely preventing “their services to be used for the sale of firearms”? Back then, Sorkin wasn’t even trying to hide that he hoped to achieve via the financial system what he could not get through Congress or the states:

 

The big financial firms don’t even have to go that far.

 

For example, Visa, which published a 71-page paper in 2016 espousing its “corporate responsibility,” could easily change its terms of service to say that it won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which make semiautomatic rifles fire faster. (Even the National Rifle Association has said it would support tighter restrictions on bump stocks.)

 

If Mastercard were to do the same, assault weapons would be eliminated from virtually every firearms store in America because otherwise the sellers would be cut off from the credit card system.

 

There is precedent for credit card issuers to ban the purchase of completely legal products. Just this month, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America banned the use of their cards to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

 

That is an unmistakable call for Visa, Mastercard, and the other processors to “eliminate” the most popular rifle in the United States and “ban the purchase of completely legal products.” And yet Sorkin now has the gall — the unmitigated brass — to suggest that the House of Representatives is being motivated to act against the very plan that he himself laid out by . . . the “culture war”?

 

In 2018, Sorkin didn’t stop there. He also mused aloud about the other financial institutions that could choose to undermine the right to keep and bear arms:

 

There are other sectors of the finance industry that could step up. For example, Lloyd’s of London is the favored insurance company for gun shows. It could pull out.

 

I am not sure I have ever seen a better example of the cynical games that gun-control advocates like to play than this. First, they demand the abolition of the Second Amendment. Then, when their opponents howl, they dramatically reduce their ask and inquire as to why their critics are so “upset.”

 

Given the sheer brazenness of this move, I can only conclude that Andrew Ross Sorkin believes that his critics are stupid. That being so, let me make this abundantly clear for him: The “proponents of banning use of the code” are not worried about the creation of a virtual “gun registry.” They’re worried that Sorkin’s plan to have credit card companies unilaterally “set new rules for the sales of guns in America” will be implemented in full. The answer, as ever, is “No.”

Supreme Court Drives a Stake Through Hawaii’s ‘Vampire Rule’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

In a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court has struck down Hawaii’s “vampire rule” as a violation of the Second and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This was the right result, and, once again, it is a disgrace that the decision was not unanimous.

 

At stake was a Hawaiian statute, Act 52, that inverted the usual presumption that governs public access to generally accessible private property, but only where firearms are concerned. Prior to the passage of Act 52, Hawaiians who were able to obtain carry permits (which, before Bruen, was effectively impossible) were allowed to enter any generally accessible private space while carrying a firearm — unless the property owner explicitly signaled otherwise. After Act 52, Hawaiians with carry permits were allowed to enter any generally accessible private space while carrying a firearm only if the property had signaled that it was acceptable. (Gothic lore holds that vampires must be explicitly invited to enter one’s home before they may cross the threshold. Hence: “vampire rule.”)

 

As the Court correctly noted, this change — which was made directly after Bruen, and which shifted only the rules governing firearms, and no others besides — was explicitly designed to impede “the ability of law-abiding citizens to exercise the right Bruen recognized as they go about their daily lives.” That being so, it fell.

 

Writing for the majority, Justice Alito recorded that:

 

At common law, opening up private property to the general public implies a “license to all persons to enter,” meaning that “no person is a trespasser by merely entering therein” unless the property owner has given “due notice” that such a person is banned.

 

“Hawaii’s shift from the common-law rule,” Alito concluded, “unquestionably imposes a new and significant burden on the exercise of the right recognized in Bruen.”

 

During briefs and at oral argument, Hawaii offered up three main defenses of its law. The first defense was that it has historically had much stricter firearms laws than much of the rest of the United States. Alito dealt with that one quickly:

 

As the plurality explained in McDonald, the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States. 561 U. S., at 784–785. It cannot give way to “the spirit of Aloha” in Hawaii, contra, State v. Wilson, 154 Haw. 8, 27, 543 P. 3d 440, 459 (2024), any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald).

 

Aloha, “spirit of Aloha.”

 

The second defense was that this wasn’t a Second Amendment case at all, but a property rights issue. This idea was picked up by Justice Jackson, who wrote in her dissent that the majority’s

 

bid to invoke the Constitution stumbles out of the gate—at step one of this Court’s Bruen test. There is no constitutional right to enter private property without the owner’s permission, let alone with a firearm.

 

But, as Justice Barrett responded in her concurrence, this cannot be true, given that the presumptive rule in question was passed by the government:

 

It is irrelevant, for purposes of the Amendment’s plain text, that a property owner has the right to exclude anyone who wishes to enter her property with firearms. No one doubts that all property owners in Hawaii could bar the carry of arms on their respective premises, if they wanted to. But the Second Amendment does not apply to private parties. It does apply to the States. See U. S. Const., Amdt. 14, §1. And when a State enacts a property law that regulates arms-bearing conduct, that law implicates the Second Amendment.

 

(Barrett also asked the obvious question: If a state passed a law presumptively barring the wearing of a hijab on generally accessible private property, absent the owner’s explicit instructions to the contrary, would anyone seriously contend that that was purely a civil matter?)

 

The third defense — and, really, the only conceptually serious one — was that there are enough similar laws in America’s historical record to render Hawaii’s law acceptable under Bruen. But this, too, collapses once one digs into the details. The examples of supposedly comparable laws that Hawaii raised were:

 

1.      That many of the original states had anti-poaching laws that governed the carrying of firearms onto private property;

 

2.      That at the end of the 19th century, Oregon had a law barring the carrying of firearms onto “enclosed premises”;

 

3.      That — yes, this was really offered up — Louisiana’s postbellum Black Code existed.

 

Justice Kagan, who conspicuously declined to join Justice Jackson’s typically overwrought and overconfident dissent, took up the poaching laws in her own dissent, contending that:

 

That the old laws had a special (though by no means exclusive) concern with poaching does not matter. “The regulatory challenges posed by firearms today are not always the same as those that preoccupied” earlier generations. New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. 1, 27 (2022). The key question is whether the challenged regulation is “consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.” United States v. Rahimi, 602 U. S. 680, 692 (2024) (emphasis added). Here, the challenged law is consistent with those principles because it reflects, as the old laws did, the perceived “abuses, damages and inconveniences” that can be caused by persons carrying guns “on other people’s lands.”

 

This is a straightforward and comprehensible argument. But, quite obviously, it does not pass muster. That the poaching laws had a “special concern” is the whole ballgame.

 

As Justice Barrett observed:

 

Rather than identifying a specific threat to public peace and safety, Hawaii admits that it enacted the rule because many of its citizens oppose the public carry of guns. In other words, Hawaii is responding to the general danger associated with the presence of firearms, not to any specific, heightened risk of their misuse.

 

Under our constitutional system — as well as every relevant precedent — only one of these regulatory approaches is permissible. If it were otherwise, governments would enjoy carte blanche to ban guns everywhere. It is true, for example, that, since the revolutionary era, governments have banned firearms from polling places. But it does not follow from this that if the government can do that, it can do anything it likes.

 

What the existence of the anti-poaching laws shows is that governments may pass narrowly tailored laws to address particular problems, not that the government may selectively invert common law standards in retaliation against the enforcement of the Bill of Rights.

 

As for the Black Code argument, I can still scarcely believe that Hawaii — or Hawaii’s lawyer, Neal Katyal — brought them up. As Justice Alito pointedly remarked:

 

The statute Hawaii cites was part of Louisiana’s Black Code, and it provided a tool for disarming blacks and thus leaving them defenseless against attacks. See 125 F. 4th, at 1239 (VanDyke, J., dissenting from denial of reh’g en banc). As we laid out in McDonald, the right to keep and bear arms was crucially important for vulnerable blacks during this period. See 561 U. S., at 757, 771, 776–779; id., at 843– 846 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). And this was well-understood by the Republicans in Congress who were responsible for drafting, approving, and securing the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Republican Party Platforms of 1856 and 1860 called for protection of the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. Unless we put history entirely out of our minds, Hawaii’s claim that this tainted artifact illuminates the original understanding of the right to keep and bear arms cannot be taken seriously.

 

Indeed. “Well, your honor, we used to have a bunch of Jim Crow laws that crushed Reconstruction” is, sadly, true. But it is not an argument against the 14th Amendment or the rights that it applies against the states. How impotent and how peculiar progressive jurisprudence has become.

What the Founders’ Drinking Habits Have to Do with Gun Rights

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, March 03, 2026

 

During yesterday’s oral arguments in the case of United States v. Hemani, Justice Neil Gorsuch posed a question that has not typically been debated in detail at the Supreme Court: whether the Founding Fathers of the United States were “all habitual drunkards.”

 

To casual observers this line of inquiry may have sounded somewhat peculiar — or perhaps even rude. On the contrary: It was brilliant. At stake in Hemani is the question of whether a person who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” can, by virtue of that habit, be generally banned from purchasing, possessing, and carrying firearms. At present, under 18 U.S.C. Section 922(g)(3), they can. But, in recent years this provision has come under attack — including in recent cases heard by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, both of which held that it is unconstitutional when used to charge someone who regularly uses drugs but has not been shown to have used them while in possession of a weapon.

 

Summing up the practical case for the rule, Justice Elena Kagan suggested that “when reality dissolves, you don’t want guns around.” But, while entirely defensible in a vacuum, this is not in fact the relevant legal standard. Under the 2022 Bruen decision, the relevant legal standard is whether, historically, any laws in the United States deprived individuals of their right to keep and bear arms on the grounds that they were “addicted to a controlled substance.” The answer to this question is that no such laws existed — and, moreover, that there were no “controlled substances,” in the legal sense of that term, until the mid-to-late 19th century. This being so, Bruen obliges the government to reason by analogy and to find “relevantly similar” laws to the one that it is defending in Court. To achieve this, it is all but forced to examine the regulation of booze.

 

It is true that, historically, America has hosted laws that sought to separate drunkards and drug users from their weapons. Crucially, though, these separations were invariably temporary. An armed man who was visibly hammered in the streets could be disarmed and thrown in a cell to sober up. But he was given back his gun the next morning. Likewise, the taverns and saloons that required patrons to check their firearms at the door returned them when the customer left. Simply being a drinker — whether casually or to excess — was not sufficient grounds for exclusion. If the use and the possession coincided, the government could act. If they did not, it was powerless. As the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas concluded, the “statutes” that the government points to as evidence of its historical authority do indeed “bar the use of firearms by intoxicated people,” but “the violation of these statutes only results in fines and imprisonment — not disarmament” on an ongoing basis.

 

Hence Gorsuch’s unassailable question. One can quibble with the exact amounts at hand, but the answer to “Were the Founders a bunch of drunkards?” is unequivocally “yes.” The plaintiff in Hemani was prosecuted after he told the authorities that he used marijuana every other day. Does that constitute an “addiction” — a term that is never defined in the statute? If so, one might have expected to find some similar rules governing alcohol — rules that did not apply temporarily, but that foreclosed the possibility of gun ownership to anyone who constantly imbibed. As Justice Gorsuch noted, if Hemani was “addicted,” then so, surely, were the Founders. The record shows that “James Madison reportedly drank a pint of whiskey every day,” and that Thomas Jefferson, who “said he wasn’t much a user of alcohol . . . had three or four glasses of wine a night.” Indeed, two nights before the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, 55 attendees repaired to the City Tavern, where, on George Washington’s tab, they “drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of Claret, 8 bottles of Whiskey, 22 bottles of Porter, 8 bottles of Hard Cider, 12 of Beer and seven bowls of Alcoholic Punch.” These, lest we forget, were the men who debated, wrote, and enforced the Second Amendment, the many state-level equivalents that preceded and succeeded it, and the majority of the statutes that filled the law books of the original 13 colonies. Evidently, none of them expected to be disarmed or to disarm their similarly “addicted” peers.

 

Permanently depriving a person of an enumerated constitutional right is supposed to be difficult. Under existing Supreme Court precedent, the federal government is permitted to do so in connection with the Second Amendment only in such instances as it can point to a “historical tradition of firearm regulation” that is consistent with its present administration. In Hemani, the government fails in that task — and all because the founding generation comprised a bunch of hearty libertarian sponges.

Gavin Newsom Is Fooling No One

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

 

What’s that old Nietzsche line about gazing long into an abyss? Gavin Newsom would do well to recall it. Eventually, Donald Trump turns all of his critics into an ersatz version of himself, and, evidently, the governor of California is not immune. It is common to hear Newsom described as an oleaginous man, but, at this point, he might better be compared to sand. Sand absorbs oil, and retains its color in the process. Of late, Newsom has absorbed an Exxon Valdez’s worth of Trump.

 

It’s not just the all-caps tweeting, or the acid mockery, or the hypocritical demands that everyone but him must play nice that Newsom has assiduously copied. It’s the chutzpah. This week, Newsom tweeted that “nothing is sacred in Trump’s America — not the First Amendment, not the Second, not even life itself,” before vowing, “We, the People, will not allow the Trump Administration to erode our rights.” An admirable sentiment, in a vacuum. But surely the “we” in the sentence cannot include Gavin Newsom?

 

The Second Amendment? At present, Newsom is engaged in a national effort to repeal it, so that it can be replaced with a version that focuses on gun control rather than gun rights. As mayor of San Francisco, Newsom urged the city’s Board of Supervisors to impose “the maximum penalty under state law” on residents who violated San Francisco’s (now struck-down) total ban on handguns and — twice — joined amicus briefs that argued that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right. As governor of California, Newsom has signed a bill that bans concealed carry at the protests he now lionizes; signed a bill that bans Glocks, the most popular handgun brand in the United States; signed a bill (now enjoined) that gutted the Bruen decision by defining “sensitive places” so extensively as to render carry impossible for millions; signed a bill (now struck down) that was intended to prevent those who challenge California’s gun laws from obtaining attorney’s fees; and signed a bill (now struck down) that regulated what could be said about guns in print if it were possible that a minor might see it.

 

The First Amendment? In 2022, Newsom signed AB 587 (now partially enforced, following a settlement), which required social media platforms to submit periodic reports to the state about how they enforce rules on categories such as hate speech, extremism, and disinformation, and the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (now enjoined), which imposed default-setting requirements on any online service that was likely to be accessed by children. In 2024, he signed SB399 (now enjoined), which barred employers from requiring employees to attend meetings or communications whose primary purpose is to convey the employer’s views on politics, religion, or union organizing, and AB 2655 (now struck down), AB 2839 (now struck down), and AB 2355, which broadly regulated the same election-related AI and digitally altered political content that Newsom frequently traffics in on social media.

 

As for “life”? Come now. Under Newsom’s leadership, California has adopted some of the most extreme abortion laws ever seen in the United States. Among the initiatives Newsom has spearheaded or signed are a bill to furnish medication abortion at every public university in the state; a series of bills that provides civil and criminal liability to anyone receiving or providing abortions; a bill that allowed abortion providers in Arizona to operate in California; a bill that required health plans in the state to cover mifepristone, irrespective of its FDA-approval status; and a constitutional amendment (Proposition 1) that renders abortion as a fundamental right and, in practice, outlaws parental consent, waiting periods, and ultrasound, and allows abortion up to the point of birth. Had Kermit Gosnell put together a legislative record, it would not meaningfully differ from Newsom’s.

 

The United States is a big country, and it is inevitable that, somewhere, it will play host to a Gavin Newsom. But it would be better for all involved if, where they must exist, the Gavin Newsoms among us would have the good manners to be honest about their preferences. Despite his pretenses, Gavin Newsom is not a champion of the First Amendment, of the Second Amendment, or of life, and he is not interested in moderation, decency, or respect for his critics, either. Within hours, Newsom will complain that Trump’s rhetoric is inappropriate and tell anyone who disagrees with him that their “knee pads are in the mail.” Concurrently, he will insist that he is a champion of the right to bear arms and sell his plan to remove that liberty from the Bill of Rights. Simultaneously, he will describe his state as a haven for freedom and embark on yet another attempt to micromanage the internet in the name of fighting misinformation. Ezra Klein, Newsom’s fellow Californian weathervane, has described this tendency to go “in two directions at once” as “fascinating.” I disagree. It is pathetic, cynical, and Trumpite — and that, in this particular case, it is being delivered by someone who has good hair and a lupine smirk does not alter that one whit.

Principle Insurance

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

 

There are so many things to say, and lessons to take, from the unjust and unjustified killing of Alex Pretti.

 

But I want to focus on one: the realist’s case for principles.

 

Advocates of realism—like champions of pragmatism, utilitarianism, existentialism, or even the gormless philosophy of going with your gut—tend to see principles as abstractions, ideological luxuries that get in the way of serious thinking, particularly during crises and the like. And let’s be fair, they sometimes have a point. I mean, Lincoln broke some rules to save the rules-based system and all that.

 

But here’s the first problem. You can’t trust politicians to decide on their own when those moments are. Some politicians are so determined to wield power, or get Big Things done, they will claim we are in a crisis when we are not. Other politicians will get confused between what a crisis is for their careers and what a crisis is for the country. Yet still others are simply cowards, unwilling or unable to hold to their principles when the political winds are blowing against them.

 

Let’s start with guns and the GOP.

 

Over the weekend, a slew of Republicans insisted that if you bring a gun to a political protest or near a federal law enforcement officer, that alone is sufficient evidence that you are a potential murderer. I am not talking about brandishing a gun or even verbally threatening to shoot someone while armed. I’m talking about having a legal, permitted firearm on your person.

 

FBI Director Kash Patel, an organizer and leading defender of the January 6 rioters, said this weekend, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.”

 

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said something similar: “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign. This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and several other prominent Republicans made similar observations. The first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California posted 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!”

 

And of course, President Donald Trump himself has made it clear that he’s a Second Amendment for me, but not for thee, kind of guy.

 

When told on January 6, 2021, that protesters armed with guns and other weapons were not being allowed to pass through magnetometers at the Ellipse to join the protest, Trump reportedly responded “I don’t effing care that they have weapons. They are not here to hurt me. Take the effing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here." But now, he insists, “You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns,” when protesting or even allegedly obstructing federal officials.

 

I have to admit, I’ve been waiting a long time for Trump to throw the gun rights folks under the bus. They were the last major constituency he never really betrayed, even rhetorically (though there was that moment in 2018, in the wake of a school shooting, when he suggested that the federal government should “take the guns first, go through due process second.”). It’s nice to finally be able to say that Trump is unreliable on every major issue his most hardcore ideological supporters care about (including immigration, by the way, but we can talk about that another time).

 

The point isn’t Trump’s flip-flop. Making a big deal about Trump being inconsistent is like stalking a bear, waiting in the woods for it to start defecating, and then blasting out a video of it to the world saying, “See! I was right!”

 

But the almost instantaneous switch in talking points from Republicans to mirror Trump shows you how little you can rely on politicians.

 

Look, I get it when people go wobbly on the Second Amendment in the wake of a mass school shooting. I’ve done that myself. But this wobbliness was in response to the shooting of a guy who was shot after he was disarmed. At least 10 times, mostly in the back. The real purpose of defending this homicide was to defend the party, and really just the president, in power. When you hear that power corrupts, this is the kind of thing you should think of. In deference to power, Republicans either abandoned their Second (and First!) Amendment principles, or they mostly stayed silent as other members of their party did it for them.

 

Principled hedge fund.

 

Okay so let’s get back to the realist case for principles. Let’s take democracy.

 

I keep saying that democracy is not a guarantor of good or even the best outcomes, it’s a hedge against bad or the worst outcomes. Now, when I say this, I’m not referring to all of the flowery and atmospheric things people often assign to the word “democracy.”

 

Indeed, the more I think about it, the more opposed I am to poetic license when it comes to democracy. I’m increasingly of the mind that we should simply make “democracy” synonymous with the word “elections.” As in, democracies are places that have (free and fair, and ideally, competitive) elections.

 

If you want a word  or phrase that conveys more of the fancy stuff we associate with democracy, well, freedom, liberty, popular sovereignty, republicanism, public opinion, the “American way” will probably do the trick, depending on the situation. There’s no shortage of terms that can carry the unnecessary load we pile on poor democracy’s back. The more we talk about the “spirit” of democracy, the easier it gets to ignore the important fact of democracy—the elections part. The more flowery you get, the more actual elections seem like just one item on a list of things democracy means, along with net neutrality, street protests (“This is what democracy looks like!”) and socialized medicine. The tipoff might have been when prison states like East Germany and North Korea felt free to put “democracy” in their official names.

 

The reason elections are the critical attribute of democracy is that elections allow us to fire people. That’s really it. There’s no magic to it. That’s the realist case for democracy. It makes oppressive government less likely. It doesn’t make dictatorship impossible, but there’s a reason that democratically elected dictators routinely do away with free and fair elections: They don’t want to get fired.

 

But I’m not here to talk about democracy. I just use it to illustrate how I increasingly think about a lot of abstract political rules or principles. Their most important function in the real world is to simply serve as a hedge or insurance policy against bad outcomes.

 

Take free markets. I love free markets. But lots of critics of the free market from the left and increasingly the right, have a point: Free markets do not guarantee optimal outcomes.

 

Free markets gave us all sorts of bad, icky, or wasteful things. Pet rocks, Love Island, Milli Vanilli, The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, AI porn, OnlyFans, and the colorized versions of Casablanca and It’s a Wonderful Life are just a few examples of thousands, nay millions, of suboptimal products brought to you by capitalism.

 

But while it’s true that free markets don’t guarantee optimal outcomes, they do guarantee better outcomes over the long haul, than any system which assumes technocratic experts are smarter than the market. In other words, devotion to free market principles insures against a government that gets to decide what people can and should spend their money on, and what investments can and should be made. There will always be exceptions to the rule. But the more dedicated society is to free markets, the higher the evidentiary burden to grant an exception. After all, the point isn’t that the government never gets it right—I can make a very strong case for government spending on basic scientific and medical research. It’s that in a system which by default assumes the government should direct the economy gets you a worse economy, and less freedom.

 

Or take the Constitution. Again: Huge fan. But I don’t think the Constitution guarantees great results. When operating properly, however, it protects us—even more than mere democracy —from bad results. People vote for bad things all the time. The Constitution makes it hard to vote — successfully — for extremely bad things. If forced to choose, I’d take an undemocratic nation dogmatically committed to honoring the Bill of Rights over one that is so fiercely democratic that it thinks the voters can vote away your rights. But history tells us you need elections to fire the people who don’t care about your rights, so elections are a necessary precondition for a lasting liberal society.

 

So here’s the thing. If you’re going to have principles, it can’t just be when they’re convenient and popular. If you believe in elections only so long as your team wins, you don’t really believe in elections. If you believe in the free market, but only when the other team is engaging in central planning and industrial policy, you don’t believe in the free market. And if you’re a passionate Second Amendment supporter when it comes to, say Kyle Rittenhouse, or some militia occupying the Michigan Statehouse, but a nurse with a holstered legal firearm was asking for death when he annoyed a federal agent, then you don’t really believe in the Second Amendment.

 

If you’re a Democrat or progressive who’s been nodding along, I’d like to say a few things in service to my point. First, if you believed that carrying a loaded weapon to protests was wrong, suspicious, or creepy when right-wingers did it, you should ask yourself whether outrage over Republican hypocrisy is blinding you to your own.

 

Likewise, if you were outraged by Republican governors threatening defiance of the Biden administration over immigration policy—or really anything else—you might want to do a rigorous personal inventory to figure out why you’re cheering the Democratic politicians in Minnesota resisting or defying the federal government. But I also think such introspection would be beneficial for many on the right. Being for something like states’ rights when the other party is in power but federal supremacy when your party is in power is not really a principle.

 

I don’t bring this up as a both-sides thing. I bring it up because my point about principles has no partisanship to it. There are all sorts of lofty or noble reasons to stick to your principles in politics, starting with it being the right thing to do and all that. But the most basic and realistic reason is that doing so makes it just a bit easier to hold the other party accountable when it is in power. Any time one team abuses power, the other team thinks the abuse is worse than it actually is, and that it will be justified to abuse power even more when it has it.

 

Lastly, what the hell do people think principles are anyway? Divine revelation notwithstanding, they are rules that have evolved over time that have proven to be useful. A lot of wisdom and trial and error has gone into these rules, which is why they become more important in times of stress and emergency, not less. Like they tell cops and soldiers, when in doubt, remember your training. Why? Because people have been through this stuff before, and they wrote down some rules to follow. And when you don’t have proper training or you’re told to ignore it for political reasons, you might end up shooting a disarmed nurse in the back.

Tread on Me

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, January 26, 2026

 

A tricky assignment today. I need to write about the latest fatal shooting of an American citizen in Minneapolis by immigration agents—except that I already wrote about it the day before it happened.

 

We’ll come back to that.

 

Alex Pretti was a 37-year-old registered nurse who worked at a local VA hospital. Like many people in his city, he was out in the streets Saturday in subzero temperatures protesting the administration's heavy-handed crackdown on immigrants and recording agents on his smartphone. His death at the hands of those agents would be captured on video recorded by others, the second time this month that immigration officers have killed a local in full view of cameras.

 

Pretti had the misfortune to be standing near a protester when she was shoved to the ground by an officer and possessed with the virtuous impulse to try to help her up as Border Patrol agents closed in. He was pepper-sprayed at least twice for his trouble, then dragged down to the asphalt as officers tried to force him into a prone position. Amid the struggle, one agent in a gray jacket noticed that he had a pistol holstered on his belt and grabbed it to disarm him.

 

A second or so later, a different agent began shooting into Pretti’s back. When it was over, no fewer than 10 shots had been fired, according to the New York Times. An edited version of an image of the victim on his knees and facing away from his masked killer as the latter aims, point-blank, is destined for infamy as a symbol of this era.

 

The most plausible explanation I’ve seen of what happened is as follows. One of the officers yelled “gun” to alert the others to Pretti’s holstered pistol; as an agent in a gray jacket removed the pistol from the scene, it may have misfired. (The weapon, a Sig Sauer P320, has enough of a reputation for doing so that the manufacturer created a webpage to address the subject.) The the agent (or agents) who fired might have heard the word “gun,” then heard the misfire, and panicked in the mistaken belief that Pretti himself had a weapon in hand and was firing at the agents.

 

All available footage indicates that the victim never touched his gun before or during the confrontation. The chief of the Minneapolis police department confirmed afterward that he was licensed to carry. After the shooting, our war-crimes-aficionado defense secretary weighed in glibly on the gruesome incident by posting three rules for avoiding ICE: Don’t be here illegally, don’t attack ICE officers, and obey federal and state laws. But Pretti followed all three—and wound up dead anyway.

 

There are a few points to be made here, some familiar and others not.

 

Impunity, not credibility.

 

My Friday newsletter was about the administration’s willingness to lie even in cases where the truth is well established and supported with extensive visual evidence. From smearing Renee Good as a domestic terrorist to distorting a photo of a protester to make it look like she was weeping during her arrest, its deceit seems designed not so much to mislead Americans as to signal its own sense of impunity in behaving sadistically toward its enemies.

 

“We will do what we like, and you will have no choice but to tolerate it” is how I described the White House’s ethos in that column. It’s dispensing with any pretense of credibility in order to show that it no longer feels bound by traditional political norms, even involving acts of lethal state violence—and that there’s nothing we, its humble subjects, can do to stop it.

 

About 16 hours after that newsletter was published, Border Patrol agents shot Alex Pretti dead and the administration instantly began telling obvious, grotesque lies about him. When I said earlier that I wrote about the shooting the day before it happened, that’s what I meant.

 

“This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” the Department of Homeland Security said in its first statement on the shooting. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino repeated that smear in a press conference. So did DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who spoke after 5 p.m. on the East Coast on Saturday, when footage of Pretti’s death taken from multiple angles was widely available. Everyone knew the administration was lying, and it lied anyway.

 

Ever eager to escalate, Stephen Miller went as far as to dub the victim a “domestic terrorist” who had “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.” Why Pretti never unholstered his weapon or tried to ambush the agents given his supposedly homicidal tendencies is unclear.

 

As in the Good case, the administration’s sense of impunity also extended to a cover-up on the agents’ behalf. More than 48 hours later, we still don’t know the name of Pretti’s shooter or the other officers involved. According to Bovino, they were quickly whisked out of state and, by extension, out of reach of Minnesota law enforcement. When local and later state cops arrived on scene to investigate Pretti’s death, they were “blocked” by federal agents—despite having obtained a search warrant.

 

Even the attire the agents were wearing broadcast a sense of impunity. I’ve gone back and forth on whether it’s worse that they were dressed in jeans and hoodies, like a gang, than it would have been if they were done up à la Bovino in fascist quasi-military chic. Both are ominous in different ways—brown shirts versus black shirts, essentially—but the irregularity of immigration officers’ current “uniforms” does seem to mirror the irregularity of their tactics. Combined with their masks, the observer is made to understand that while they’re technically agents of the state, they aren’t accountable to the same rules that other government officers are, even in their manner of dress. Proceed at your own risk.

 

At this point, only the most vampiric postliberal or pitiful partisan sucker will continue to believe anything this administration says, especially when it involves violence perpetrated by its own personnel. There is no doubt—zero—that the White House would have aggressively hidden the truth about Pretti’s death if bystanders hadn’t captured it. Just as there’s also no doubt that, despite the president’s claim that his team is “reviewing” the incident, none of the agents involved will serve time in prison. To punish them would mean that Trump’s left-wing critics were correct about his immigration tactics; the MAGA right would sooner see would sooner see many more Americans brutalized by ICE than admit that.

 

Who started it?

 

Pretti’s death is harder for Republicans to spin than Renee Good’s was. A motivated partisan and/or cop apologist could watch the video of Good attempting to drive away from ICE agents and pretend that she intended for a split second to mow down one of them in her car. The officer shot her in self-defense, you see.

 

At no point did Pretti behave aggressively with the Border Patrol, though, and so in his case blaming the victim is more difficult. Instead, the argument I saw repeatedly on social media this weekend imputed collective blame: Minnesota Democrats from Gov. Tim Walz on down incited locals to harass immigration officials, which naturally placed officers there on edge, which in turn led them to assume the worst about Good’s and Pretti’s intentions. If the left hadn’t been so insistent on confrontation, these tragedies never would have happened. They started it!

 

It’s nonsense on stilts.

 

By any measure, Trump and his henchmen instigated the situation in Minneapolis. They targeted the city not because it has a rampant problem with illegal immigration but because they wanted to stage a big, muscular culture-war pageant at the expense of local Somalis, to draw attention to the fraud scandal in which some are involved. (Most of that Somali population is here legally, by the way.) To prove that they meant business, they sent a preposterously huge number of immigration agents to conduct a crackdown, maximizing the operation’s visibility and its disruption to the city.

 

And instead of prioritizing the arrest of violent criminals, which everyone supports, they carried out the Miller-Noem strategy of detaining as many suspected illegals as possible, including ones who are welcome in the community. They rolled into Minneapolis less as a law enforcement agency and more as an occupying army, with Bovino as commanding general. And occupying armies tend to have a distinctly different mindset about the neighborhoods they patrol than police officers who live in those neighborhoods, with predictable results.

 

To make matters worse, the administration has done everything possible to show Minnesotans that it doesn’t expect its immigration officers to behave professionally and won’t punish them if they don’t. It lowered hiring standards for ICE, slashed training times, and tailored its recruitment strategy to appeal to chuds whom it knew would revel in the chance to abuse undesirables. “We haphazardly scaled up a poorly trained police force to storm into neighborhoods that voted against the president, where we antagonize the local population until someone resists arrest, and then we kill them” is how writer Derek Thompson summarized the White House’s M.O.

 

According to the Associated Press, when a crowd gathered at the scene of Pretti’s death and began shouting at the officers, one agent mocked them by replying, “Boo hoo.” We’re supposed to be surprised that Minneapolis residents are suspicious of this renegade goon squad and eager to jeer at them to leave their city?

 

To too many Republicans, the mere fact that immigration officers carry the imprimatur of law enforcement grants them a talismanic benefit of the doubt. Alex Pretti made Border Patrol agents uncomfortable by filming them—entirely legally—and distracted them from their duties, and so it doesn’t matter that they, not he, escalated the situation in every respect. He bears moral responsibility for his own death because he was passively antagonistic to men in badges, sound justification for lethal force in the postliberal mind if ever there was one.

 

The right believes, correctly, that immigration law should be enforced and also believes, incorrectly, that enforcement can and should occur only in the brutal, provocative manner in which it’s currently occurring. The fact that millions of illegal immigrants were deported under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and, yes, the first Trump administration without the sort of backlash we’re seeing in Minneapolis evidently provides no insight into whether the tactics favored by the current White House are perhaps the reason for that backlash.

 

Trump the moderate?

 

You know we’re in a dark place culturally when Donald Trump sounds more circumspect about Alex Pretti’s death than his own deputies and many of his core voters.

 

It’s an old gripe among conservatives that liberals are forever declaring the current leader of the GOP to be the worst person ever, only to develop strange new respect for him after he makes way for a new GOP leader and that person is declared the worst person ever. (Left unsaid among the gripes is whether liberals might have a point about the right’s character gradually degrading.) I swear that I’ll never write a column about how much I miss the president after he’s gone, but I do feel obliged to note that Trump seems more chastened by Pretti’s shooting than some of the people around him.

 

His first post on the matter was predictable, blaming Democrats for inciting antagonism against agents, but the president was reportedly “frustrated” by operations in Minneapolis even before the shooting occurred because he feared the bad press was muddling his immigration message. (He’s right.) On Sunday, after Pretti was killed, Trump was asked twice by the Wall Street Journal whether the officer responsible had done the right thing and twice Trump refused to say yes. Unless I missed it, he hasn’t joined the Noem-Bovino-Miller parade in smearing Pretti as an assassin either.

 

On Monday morning, the president announced that border czar Tom Homan is taking over operations in Minnesota and will report directly to him. That had a whiff of de-escalation about it: Homan famously dislikes Noem and opposes her preference for mass deportation, preferring to prioritize criminals instead. If he’s taking over in the city, ICE and Customs and Border Protection might soon have a lighter footprint and an approach more targeted at the actual bad guys.

 

Then, a few hours ago, news broke that Bovino will be leaving Minnesota imminently. The whiff has become a distinct aroma.

 

I won’t insult your intelligence by speculating that the president felt terribly about Pretti’s death, but I can absolutely believe that he feels terribly about his numbers on immigration going down the toilet. It’s strange to think that a guy with his own cult who will never again stand for election would panic upon learning that the public doesn’t support his masked gang, but maybe it’s a legacy matter for him. Immigration is supposed to be his bread-and-butter, the thing that won him the last election. Being suddenly despised for it may have rattled him.

 

Although, Trump being Trump, it’s probably a product of pure narcissism. The president has always cared to an unhealthy degree about “numbers,” and he knows which way his numbers are moving as public patience for ICE’s tactics wears thin.

 

Either way, his henchmen and supporters aren’t burdened by the same psychological pressure to be liked—not by the general public, anyway. Noem, Bovino, and Miller felt free to smear Alex Pretti ghoulishly because their constituency is MAGA, and they knew MAGA would appreciate it. Ditto for Rep. Randy Fine, who celebrated the shooting by announcing, “An armed seditionist attacked federal law enforcement today as they were rounding up foreign invaders in Minneapolis. The insurrectionist was put down. Well done.” There was a lot in that vein from the populist faithful on social media.

 

Some postliberal “influencers” responded to the shooting by calling on followers to show unthinking support for immigration agents irrespective of the morality of their conduct, continuing the Trumpist tradition dating back to the Access Hollywood episode of demanding the highest loyalty to excuse the most disgusting conduct. Others one-upped them by calling on Trump to get tough, invoke the Insurrection Act, and “crush these terrorist riots” in Minneapolis. What good is having a fascist as president, after all, if he won’t deliver an Iran-style bloodbath when circumstances warrant?

 

I’m not prepared for an America where Donald Trump is a voice of comparative moderation among the feral right, but then I wasn’t prepared for a world where Marjorie Taylor Greene is a voice of moderation either. Yet here we are.

 

It was all a lie.

 

We’ve all gotten used to “conservatives” betraying every principle they ever claimed to hold, but even I was surprised by how many Republicans this weekend tried to blame Pretti for his own death by zeroing in on the fact that he was … carrying a loaded gun.

 

Why I was surprised, I don’t know. I suppose the fact that gun rights are such a sacred part of populist right-wing culture, not merely political ideology, led me to assume that GOPers would steer clear of faulting the victim for lawfully having a weapon on him. If nothing else, hypocrisy should have warned them away from making an issue of it: Trump fans have been bringing guns with them to protests for years.

 

But no. The director of the FBI confidently assured Fox News on Saturday that, “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple.” Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about: You absolutely can do that if you’re licensed to carry, and any Republican in America would have wet his pants if a Biden administration official had argued otherwise.

 

Amazingly, Kash Patel wasn’t the only Justice Department employee who has concluded that the Second Amendment no longer applies in the presence of the Border Patrol. “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli observed. No, there isn’t—unless you’re brandishing that gun, in which case the police might reasonably fear that you’re about to shoot.

 

But carrying a gun in a holster? That wasn’t an offense warranting summary execution until now.

 

Many other right-wingers on social media joined the huffing and puffing about Pretti’s pistol, leading Toronto Sun columnist Bruce Arthur to this observation: “I almost appreciate how Trump has exposed how vacant every single high profile conservative belief was: free speech, states’ rights, letting the market decide, NATO, right to bear arms, democracy, all of it. It’s been an empty, malicious political project for decades and decades.”

 

Is he wrong?

 

The modern American right is so hollow and ridiculous a political movement that its most notorious conspiracy theorist, a figure who’s screeched about government tyranny for decades, was reduced on Saturday to defending the shooting of a helpless, unarmed man at close range by masked federal goons. It reminded me of how the rioters with the most sinister designs at the January 6 insurrection were the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia formed to defend the constitutional order from federal encroachment. When a fascist right-wing president undertook to destroy that order by staging a coup, those supposed “anti-government” heroes eagerly volunteered as muscle.

 

To borrow a phrase from former GOP consultant Stuart Stevens, the conservative movement was all a lie. Not for everyone, of course—The Dispatch wouldn’t exist otherwise—but for a great many right-wingers the principles of conservatism were plainly not much more than window dressing for the friends/enemies distinction that actually drives their politics. They favored small government not because they cared about liberty in principle but because they believed liberals were more disposed to use federal power aggressively, and therefore shrinking government would benefit the right on balance. Once Trump came along and showed that Republicans could abuse federal power too, up to and including creating a masked secret police force tasked with purging undesirables, that calculus went out the window.

 

It turns out that the key words in the famous slogan on the Gadsden flag weren’t the first two but the last two. Don’t tread on me—but on you, or on a guy with a smartphone who got in the goon squad’s way? That’s a different matter.

 

There wasn’t much left of conservatism when Alex Pretti was shot, but watching “patriots” rush to justify lethal force by the government against a citizen for carrying a lawful weapon finished off whichever part was still twitching. It wasn’t always an “empty, malicious political project” but it sure is now. Good riddance.

Gun-Blaming in Minneapolis

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

 

Here at The Dispatch, we make a point of sitting out the race to be first to get it wrong on a story, and there is much that we do not know about the shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday. That said, I will for the purpose of this column work from these assumptions, which at the moment seem reasonable: Agents made an attempt to arrest Pretti, who was legally carrying a pistol; Pretti was disarmed by an agent; the other agents in the scrum may not have been clear on the fact that Pretti had been disarmed; the agent in possession of Pretti’s pistol possibly—this is not an established fact—discharged it by accident; hearing the shot—and the word “Gun!” having been shouted—the agents shot and killed Pretti, firing a total of 10 rounds. The Trump administration, being the Trump administration, immediately set about lying about what had happened, and the usual politics of gun rights were immediately flipped on their head, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem insisting that Pretti had been an armed rioter, which is—I do not suppose this even needs saying at this point—not true. Among others, the president of the Minnesota Gun Owners Law Center affirmed: “I see nothing that Mr. Pretti did that was unlawful,” at least with respect to his gun.

 

But strangely, a great many people who sometimes call themselves libertarians began to insist that when an officer of the state gives you an order, your choices are: 1) comply meekly; 2) get gunned down. Ernest Hemingway had their number way back in 1940: “There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes.”

 

Already there is percolating a story that the real fault here may lie not with the federal agents but with Pretti’s firearm, a Sig Sauer P320. Anthony Blair, writing in the New York Post (a once-great institution that has become the in-house organ of the Trump administration), describes the pistol as “a popular handgun that has a history of unintentionally firing,” which is not quite right—but it is the case that there is a legend to that effect. There are many firearms that have a “history of unintentionally firing,” and they mainly fall into the category of “firearms in the hands of poorly trained people looking for an excuse after accidentally firing a gun.”

 

The Sig P320 is one of the most widely deployed firearms in the world, with millions and millions of them in use, many among civilians but also, more to the point here, among the professionals in law-enforcement and military organizations, which often use the P320 as a standard-issue sidearm. (I myself own one and have owned a few others.) There have been more than 100 lawsuits and many investigations stemming from claims of the P320 going off by itself. These fall into two categories: 1) drop-firing, i.e., the question of whether the pistol may go off when dropped; 2) other kinds of accidental discharge, with claims of the pistol going off with no trigger pull when in the hands of a shooter or in a holster.

 

It is entirely possible for a gun in a holster, or in a pocket, to go off unintentionally owing to an unintentional trigger pull. You probably have had an experience like the one I had a week ago when one of my little ones woke up early and I decided to take him on an early-morning coffee run; while undertaking the necessary contortions to strap him into his car seat, I somehow managed to set off the alarm on my minivan, almost certainly by unintentionally pressing the panic button on the key fob, which was in my right front trouser pocket. It is a little button and not easy to get to, but things in pockets get bumped around in unpredictable ways, which is why we have the phrase “butt-dialing.” As it goes with key fobs and mobile phones, so it goes with pocketed pistols.

 

This can be a deadly thing when it comes to firearms. I knew a man who accidentally shot himself to death with a double-action revolver, “double-action” meaning that pulling the trigger is a relatively long and heavy affair that causes the hammer to go all the way back before being released, as opposed to the single-action revolvers you’ve seen in Westerns, where you have to pull the hammer back with your thumb each time before firing it. The accidental shooting victim in this case had the revolver in a shoulder holster, and it seems that he was trying to climb over a wire livestock fence when he either got tangled up or experienced some other difficulty. We do not know exactly what happened, but the revolver was fired while in his shoulder holster, and the bullet struck his abdomen, killing him. That is an unlikely occurrence, though obviously not an impossible one: The long and heavy pull of the double-action trigger is a very reliable safety feature, which is why many of these revolvers do not have a manual safety—the trigger itself is a safety. (The double-action trigger pull is so much longer and heavier than on a modern semiautomatic pistol that shooters trained mainly on contemporary firearms find such handguns difficult to shoot as accurately as modern semiautomatics, and those looking to make a particularly accurate shot often go to the trouble of thumbing the hammer back to fire in single-action mode on firearms where that is possible.) The P320 is a single-action automatic, double-action automatics being uncommon. (To be precise: Double-action only automatics are uncommon; most automatics with exterior hammers can be hammer-cocked the way most revolvers can.) The double-action only automatics on the market often are marketed as carry guns, with the double-action trigger being highlighted as a safety feature. The old single-action Colt-style revolvers were notoriously easy to accidentally discharge for several reasons, which is why the wise cowboy’s six-shooter was, in practice, a five-shooter, with prudent men carrying the revolver with the hammer down on an empty chamber.

 

I have made a fair study of the claims of the P320’s supposed vulnerability to accidental discharge, and what I reached are two tentative conclusions:

 

First: Like almost any handgun, the P320 will discharge unintentionally if dropped in precisely the right way (meaning precisely the wrong way) from a sufficient height, the going theory there being that the weight of the trigger is enough that the trigger can be in effect pulled by momentum if it lands at a very specific angle. It is worth noting that some of the drop tests that have found the P320 vulnerable to drop firing involve some very unlikely scenarios—such as the gun being dropped 50 feet or fired out of a trebuchet—and that all of them involved essentially reverse-engineering a drop fire and trying to make it happen. I would be very surprised (and I’ll take your bets here) if 1,000 random drops of a P320 from shoulder height produced a discharge.

 

Second: I have found no persuasive evidence that the P320 can be fired without the trigger being depressed. But it may be easier to accidentally depress the trigger than one might expect. The manufacturer (which obviously has financial and legal incentives to minimize the perception of risk) offers an animated video of how the mechanism works here, and it is worth watching. That is not to say that the trigger cannot be accidentally operated even when the pistol is holstered, particularly if the holster is not designed for that firearm. Of the many claims of self-actuated P320 discharges, none has even been repeated in the kind of observable demonstration that one would expect could be easily achieved if there was some special defect in the design. For comparison, getting an old Colt Army revolver to fire accidentally from snagging the hammer on something is pretty easy to replicate. Some people—including some very knowledgeable experts—do not think much of the P320 design, and a few think it is uniquely dangerous. But this remains—at best—a contested claim, and in the cases in which accidental discharges have been rigorously investigated, the cause of the accident was found to be operator error in the overwhelming majority, while poor holster design—allowing the trigger to be accidentally pressed like my minivan key fob—played a role in a few, as did malfeasance. It is worth noting that the best-known case of an unintentional P320 discharge involved an Army veteran who had a holstered P320 inside a zipped pants pocket. Pocket carry, even with a holster designed for pocket use, is a controversial practice among shooters; I myself would not carry any automatic pistol with a round in the chamber in a pants pocket, even in a pocket holster.

 

I have fired and (unhappily!) owned defective handguns. They are a real thing. I once owned a semiautomatic pistol made by a very well-known U.S. manufacturer that would discharge unintentionally—not without the trigger being pulled but, owing to what my gunsmith informed me was a problem with the sear, firing two- or three-round bursts with one trigger pull, effectively becoming a fully automatic weapon for a moment until it jammed. Needless to say, I did not carry that pistol—or keep it, in spite of the manufacturer’s offer to repair or replace it.

 

Firearms bring something out in people—a strange mix of fear, enjoyment, and awe. Urban legends and conspiracy theories have a way of attaching themselves to firearms, especially those that are associated with military or police use. Before it was the P320 that was supposed to be extra-dangerous, similar stories circulated about Glock pistols, which are (according to the consensus view of people who have spent years and years subjecting them to sometimes extraordinary testing, from running them over with trucks to freezing them in ice) damned near impossible to get to fire accidentally but which will fire every single time when the trigger is pulled—intentionally or by mistake. But we’ve gone through a million versions of this: Glocks, being made of polymer, can be sneaked through airport metal detectors (a fantasy); AR-15 rounds are specially designed to tumble in human flesh to inflict maximum damage (a myth that probably was furthered by people with an interest in selling AR-15s to the army back in the day); that idiotic NPR story about “exploding” handgun rounds (short version: They do not explode); etc. There are millions of P320s in use (about 3 million sold in the civilian market alone and about a million more to police and military agencies worldwide) and millions of Glocks, and it seems to me that, given the numbers, genuine design flaws in either firearm would be much more conclusively demonstrable if they existed.

 

On the other hand, poor training and irresponsible gun-handling are facts of life—and in particular facts of life when it comes to ICE and, to a lesser extent, federal agencies such as the Border Patrol. As much as Kristi Noem gets her tactical panties in a bunch when it comes to protesters in Minneapolis, it seems to me undeniable that Renee Good and Alex Pretti would be alive today but for the incompetence of the federal agents under her supervision. Even if you believe that Good or Pretti acted irresponsibly—even if you believe one or both acted illegally—competent and properly trained agents would have been able to handle either situation in a non-lethal way. And it is not clear that Good or Pretti acted in any way illegally. It has been especially galling to watch charter members of the Kyle Rittenhouse Fan Club clutch their pearls at the sight of Alex Pretti exercising his constitutionally protected rights—one can, after all, exercise First Amendment rights and Second Amendment rights at the same time.

 

I myself probably would not choose to carry a firearm into the Minneapolis situation for much the same reason I do not avail myself of the option of open carry where it is legal unless I am, for example, in the woods in bear country. People who swagger around with guns on their hips or with rifles slung over their shoulders seem to me to be acting in a way that shows a lack of prudence and good taste—but we do not shoot people nine or 10 times over matters of good taste, or for having the wrong kind of politics, or for living in a city and a state where the mayor and the governor have politics that are different from those of the president and the secretary of Homeland Security.

 

The National Rifle Association (of which I am a former member) has here been mostly consistent, at least: The NRA’s political cowardice and its utter subordination to momentary Republican political needs are very nearly unwavering. Some Democrat gets froggy about scary black rifles and the NRA unleashes a barrage of angst and wailing that sounds like a Chinese opera company in a pitched battle with 14 tons of wind chimes, but when the Trump administration and its sycophants unveil a new policy—basically, “Do as you’re told, peon, or we’ll shoot you on the spot!”—all these craven monkey-butlers have to say is very little more than, “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation,” and “lower the temperature.” Who do you think is raising the temperature in Minneapolis, you ridiculous ninnies?

 

But I think I know how this will go: blame the victims, blame the gun, blame anything but the incompetents making the policy and the incompetents carrying it out.