This case is not quite so clear-cut as the last one in Minnesota, where multiple bystander videos unambiguously showed an aggressive confrontation with one standing protester shouting “Drive baby drive” when the driver is asked to step out of the car, before the driver drives directly at an officer. For liberals, though, the woman was simply “driving away”!
Today brings news of another tragic death. In this case it seems officers shot an armed protester. The undisputed case seems to be that the man attended an ICE operation, interfered with that operation, was carrying a gun, legally, and when officers tried to detain him fought back. I’ve watched one of the videos. CNN makes a play out of how an agent is seen to take the weapon off the man and move away before he is shot. The point they are trying to make is that the officers shot an unarmed man. This may be true, not quite in the sense of “driving away”. I.e it has some truth in it. This case is more concerning. That said; let’s think for a moment. And watch the video carefully. I hypothesis that someone shouted “gun”; this is what British police do when a gun is sighted on a suspect. Even if not, one can hypothesis that other officers had seen the weapon and were aware it was a gun situation. At just that moment the man who was subsequently shot breaks free and starts to rise up. From the point of view of the officers this is a situation involving firearms and the person they are trying to detain is freeing himself. It is an entirely reasonable instinctive assumption to frame that as he is doing so in order to be able to shoot. Either, they are acting instinctively and haven’t rationally processed that the gun has been taken off him, or they have, but are allowing the possibility that there is a second gun. Either is an acceptable basis for police officers to act on.
if people interfere with police or other law enforcement officers engaged in legal activities, and fight with them, while being armed, even if they have a permit, they are inviting trouble.
And yet we are going to be deluged with liberal phantasies about how this was some kind of atrocity.
The Guardian gets off to a roaring start with a story about how the shot man was holding a ‘phone not a gun’. This is a classic liberal hoax. Yes, Mr Pretti was at one point holding a phone and filming officers, (a standard aggressive tactic of these protesters though not of course a reason to shoot him). They are trying to give the impression that “it was not a gun, it was a phone”. By juxtaposition. The fact is, it appears, and as appears later on in the article Mr Pretti did have a gun. This article also confirms my supposition that someone had shouted “gun” and officers felt they were confronting an armed aggressor.
The Guardian article simply misses out the key detail that after he had apparently been disarmed Mr Pretti throw off the agents who were detaining him and tried to break free. The Guardian authors writes :
Even as the publicly available video evidence showed clearly that federal agents had killed an observer who was merely recording their activities on his phone, Noem, the homeland security secretary, stuck to the administration’s story at the briefing, originally scheduled to discuss the winter storm, on Saturday evening.
“Merely recording on phone” is what happens in the liberal mind when they see an armed protester interfering with a police operation and violently resisting officers. And these people want to govern.