Alex Pretti, a Veterans Administration intensive care nurse in Minneapolis, lost his life today for exercising his constitutional right to bear arms. It would appear that the ever-so-precious Second Amendment, the interpretation of which has expanded extensively within my lifetime alone, only applies to right-of-center Americans who support the rapid transformation of the U.S. government from democratic to authoritarian.

Mr. Pretti was a licensed gun owner with a permit to carry the concealed weapon. He did not brandish his weapon at law enforcement. Cellphone camera recordings tell a different story. There is no way to know why he was armed; we only know he broke no law in carrying a gun. And we know that his care of people extended to the streets.

Pretti’s last act on earth was to to defend a victim of federal agent overreach and overreaction. In extended video, these agents appeared agitated by the constant screech of whistles and were perhaps provoked to anger by something said by the woman Pretti defended. Nevertheless, these agents were not doing their duty when shooting Pretti in the back while on his knees! The recordings all make it look like an agent or two snapped when a good Samaritan had the nerve to come between them and a can of pepper spray they were repeatedly using against a woman one had pushed down.

There were three or four agents against two protesters that then becamse six or seven agents against just Mr. Pretti. The man did not have his weapon out. When shot, he did not even have it on him anymore, according to video. Alex Pretti was quite simply shot execution style when agents could have just arrested him. Then they left the scene of a homicide without securing it for investigation. DHS, after immediately spinning the encounter as a justified shooting, is allegedly going to conduct the investigation.

I, like many others, am enraged. And this is just one week after giving a speech* at a Shabbat service commemorating MLK Day, calling for us all to believe in our own power of change, our own need to put some elbow grease into bending the moral arc toward justice, and our need to keep the cameras ready! Alex Pretti did those things, as did Renee Good, and it literally resulted in blood in the streets. I believe this administration wants its opposition to fear that outcome; I believe it wants blood in the streets to justifying militarizing the entire country and taking us someplace from which we are not likely to return anytime soon, if at all. In short, it wants rage, and it wants the opposition to manifest it physically.

How does the opposition turn rage into action that actually produces a just result, without providing a catalyst for the administration to execute more people and justify it with nonsense? I do not know. I just know that giving the administration the point of no return it so desperately seeks is a bad idea. What is called for is a response not a reaction, and the best response would be homicidal federal agents under arrest. Perhaps all energy should be targeted to that end.

*excerpts available in Columns