Alex Pretti’s martyrdom in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the hands of a group of excited Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents followed hard upon Renée Good’s two weeks earlier. Watching the video of these spontaneous public executions of what appear to be ordinary American citizens has led many caring souls in the United States and across the globe to see a diabolical hand at work within the core of the political system run from Washington, DC. The debate is raging as to who are the devils and who are the angels.

The Brazilian publication Revista Abril made perhaps the strongest and most precise critique of ICE, an agency created purportedly with the goal of defending the integrity of US demography and culture. Instead, the journal sees “ICE, and the culture it represents” as “a threat not only to immigrants, but to the moral and civic health of the United States of America.” It claims that “its structure, function, and practices are fundamentally incompatible with human decency, democratic governance, and intelligent policy.” The AI-generated cartoon illustrating the article shows a robotic monster with the label “ICESTAPO” with a boot on the neck of the Statue of Liberty, a suffering lady who has been thrown to the ground.

Revista published this condemnation five days before the wanton killing of Veterans Affairs nurse Alex Pretti, an execution conducted last Saturday by a thuggish group of official ICE agents, who managed to fire at least ten shots at a man who had just been pepper-sprayed before being thrown and pinned to the ground by those same agents.

Following Good’s killing on January 7, administration officials claimed that the agent who shot her was acting in self-defense. He claimed she was seeking to run him over with her car. In Pretti’s case, the excuse was that he had a gun. We’ve long known that if the US loves two things, it’s cars and guns.

Cars, of course, may be used as lethal weapons, but that is not what they were built for. Handguns, however, have no other credible purpose than to wound or kill another human being. It was therefore easy to conclude that if Pretti was carrying a weapon, his intention could only have been to use it against the law enforcement officers whose job he appeared intent on impeding.

A citizen was dead and very quickly was widely lamented. Law enforcement had acted perhaps excessively, but that was hardly exceptional. All should have fallen into order (as in the expression, “law and order”) if only an unexpected aporia hadn’t emerged. Most people expect the political ideology associated with Republican conservatism to weigh in systematically on the side of rigorous law enforcement. Traditionally, these same promoters of respect for the law and no pity for lawbreakers also fiercely defend the right of ordinary citizens to “bear arms.” They gleefully follow the historically contestable logic of a Bill of Rights designed for a very different 18th century society.

Here, however, was a case of a law enforcement entity that literally resembles a militia executing in cold blood someone guilty of the crime of exercising a constitutional right they ordinarily hold as sacred. Indeed, many of them deem it not just a right but a duty for upstanding citizens to possess and carry a firearm. They do so on the rather shaky grounds that there can be nothing to fear from “a good guy with a gun.”

This leaves them with the question: Was Pretti a good guy with a gun? After all, he kept it concealed and unless you consider a smartphone’s camera a lethal weapon, he wasn’t acting the way bad guys act. Or was he a bad guy with a gun, as everyone in the Trump administration claims? Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol Official in charge, claimed Pretti “injected himself [sic]” into a crime scene and “violently resisted” when agents attempted to disarm him. (The word he was seeking was probably “interjected,” but Bovino may have been daunted by the number of syllables of that verb. Another theory would be that he was seeking to associate Pretti with drug traffic and was thinking of heroin injections.)

Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, accused the victim of “brandishing” a handgun and said: “[Pretti] wasn’t there to peacefully protest. He was there to perpetuate [sic] violence.” (The verb she was undoubtedly looking for is “perpetrate.”) The ineffable Stephen Miller, Trump’s trusted Senior Advisor, described Pretti as a “domestic terrorist.”

Video of the killing demonstrates clearly that all those statements were outright lies. But affirming falsehoods created a new problem for this administration that sees domestic law and order as the object of a military campaign. The suggestion that Pretti was “guilty” because he had a gun upset most of those who believe that the second amendment has the value of a second commandment.

Is there something incurably rotten in the state of US culture?

The debate surrounding this quandary of whether Pretti was a good guy or a bad guy highlights two essential features of US culture. The first is the tendency of all Americans, whatever their ideology or political preferences, to avoid debate, refuse to consider nuance and literally “stick to one’s guns” in the name of defending a belief. Whether that belief is the conviction of the divine origin of the second amendment (and the US Constitution itself); the inherent virtue of capitalism or socialism; abortion rights; climate “truth” or simply the right to censor and cancel people for their opinions on any of these so-called “principled” issues, rather than seeking to understand what considerations motivate the opposing point of view, they prefer branding their opponent’s position as extreme and inflexible. This reflects a broader trend in US culture to see context as irrelevant and adherence to “principle” as the foundation of morality.

The rise of social media has aggravated this fundamental polarizing effect that has always been present in US culture. In the false debate about Pretti’s murder, each side seeks to assign guilt to one of the two parties. This is understandable in the case of a killing, but it makes less sense when considering the deeper significance of these incidents, the ones Revista Abril highlighted: “to the moral and civic health of the United States of America.” Will dismantling ICE or even the Department of Homeland Security as some politicians have proposed automatically restore moral and civic health? So long as the “principles” remain alive for a significant portion of the population, policies may change but conflict will abide. And every change in policy tends to generate a new movement of resistance.

The other feature illustrated by these killings in Minneapolis is even harder to deal with precisely because the only way to frame it is in legal terms, as a policy to be concretized in legislation rather than a social and cultural issue. I’m referring to the strange phenomena (for those outside the US) of America’s gun culture.

Why was Pretti carrying a gun? The easy answer to that is that he was exercising a constitutional right. But such an answer evades the real question: Why was he “brandishing” a telephone? That is also his constitutional right, but to answer that we would cite two obvious purposes: to make and receive calls and to take pictures or record video. As for the gun, the authorities claimed his purpose was to attack them. Defenders of the notion of “gun rights” (can guns have rights?) will probably respond that Pretti “carried” to protect himself from any number of threats coming from either crazy people or animals. His behavior at the time of the confrontation showed that he wasn’t at that moment ready to take the initiative of using it even for self-protection from the armed and clearly threatening ICE agents.

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land)

The question citizens of nations that ignore the notion of “gun rights” inevitably wonder about is this: What is the nature of a society in which people whose daily activities do not ordinarily involve the use of lethal weapons feel compelled to possess, carry and conceal those weapons? The simple answer would be that they have been conditioned to live in a permanent state of fear. We who live elsewhere might then suppose that the much admired dynamism of the US economy depends on the maintenance of a state of insecurity and fear, specifically fear for one’s life. It plays out not only in the city streets but perhaps more permanently in the sense of vulnerability felt by a population who can never be certain that their fortunes or lives will not be destroyed from one day to the next by a lack of health care coverage.

It sometimes feels as if Americans believe that fear is what’s required to motivate enterprising people to succeed. The background anguish keeps them on the qui vive, energizing them to dare and accomplish the impossible. But there’s another element of gun culture that, though it should be equally obvious, Americans rarely acknowledge. It’s related to the polarization effect generated by every individual’s personal belief system I mentioned earlier. I’m referring to a phenomenon for which the entertainment industry bears much of the responsibility. It’s the idea that all insoluble problems can be — and perhaps must be — ultimately solved with firearms. Even a life sentence in prison can’t bring the kind of emotional resolution Hollywood has habituated us to expect from tense dramas. 

It’s hardly surprising that generations of Americans have come to believe that closure comes and order is only restored when the “bad guys” are physically eliminated. At least they’ve always sold that as a “pretty good story.” 

*[The Devil’s Advocatepursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more ofthe Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.