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Notes -
My brother posted some weird screed on Facebook about how handsome Pretti was compared to the ICE agent who shot him, how healthy Pretti looked, how educated Pretti was compared to the typical ICE agent. Basically implying it was dysgenic to shoot Pretti, except I think eugenics is still considered a no-no. I seriously tried to puzzle out if my brother was in the closet despite having a string of serious girlfriends.
I think it was bad to shoot Pretti. I also think Pretti did some stupid things and earned a stupid prize, and that was apparent even before this video came out.
For the, "Pretti is not a hero" argument:
He went to a protest while armed, which is apparently illegal in Minnesota. He wasn't wearing a comfortable weapon that would be typically worn in for a conceal carry. It was a several thousand dollar handgun that had several accessories making it bulky and likely uncomfortable to wear for extended periods of time. It's highly unlikely he just forgot that the gun was on him at the time.
If someone is conceal carrying and gets any kind of attention from a law enforcement officer, that person needs to keep their hands visible, clearly state, "I have a conceal carry permit, gun is on my (left/right)," and do exactly what the police officers say. Pretti had a right to self defense. So do LEOs. And they will exercise their right to self defense very quickly and broadly if they feel threatened.
Pretti did not act like someone should when conceal carrying in the presence of LEOs. He joined in a fracas. He shoved someone, then wiggled around while being held down by CBP. Now, the wiggling around is basically a human reflex, but it is one that must be suppressed if you find yourself in the position of being arrested.
On the flip side, no one should be shot for exhibiting a normal human reflex. Typically that does not happen in most arrests. My understanding of the situation, from the perspective of the CBP, is:
They were there to arrest a bad guy. A bunch of screaming people started getting in their way, blowing whistles in their faces. Again. They are trying to arrest their third bad guy of the day, after working 10 days in a row. Somehow, having to arrest child rapists isn't the worst part of their jobs. They haven't slept well for over a week, because these screaming whistle people are also banging pots and pans together all night outside every hotel they've tried to retreat to.
One of the screaming whistle women gets too close, pings some sort of danger radar, one of the CBP agents pepper spray her. Guess it's arrest time. Try to arrest her, a screaming whistle man comes and tries to push you off her. He just signed up to get arrested for assaulting an officer. He tries to fight you off, it takes four of you to try to hold him down.
One of your buddies sees a holstered gun. He reaches in, grabs it and says, "I've got his gun."
Unfortunately, you are still surrounded by the damned whistle people. You don't hear all that sentence. You heard the word "gun" because your ears are highly invested in hearing the word "gun." But the rest of it is drowned out by the drone of invectives being thrown your way.
The detainee's gun goes off in the agents hands. One of the infamous Uncommanded Discharges from a Sig. The bullet hits the ground next to an agent's foot. This created an imminent sense they were in deadly danger. There was a gun, they were being shot at. They shot the detainee.
Now, the dumb part is they shot the detainee while he was being detained by four of their own people. They were holding his hands. He wasn't facing them. He could not have possibly been the source of the shot. And shooting him risked the lives of the people trying to restrain him. This was a really bad shoot.
Legally, I don't know if they should be charged with murder, manslaughter, or just placed on leave and given a desk job. I think Pretti's family has standing to sue for a good amount of money. It was a bad shoot. And Pretty played stupid games and won a fatal prize.
Was this before or after Pretti’s portrait and the subsequent tail light video got released? Seeing Pretti’s actual face and athleticism (or lack thereof) in action may temper his mancrush.
Dysgenics are and have always been within the Overton window when it comes to discussing red tribe or religious whites reproducing. However, indeed, regarding any sort of whites reproducing as eugenic lies outside of the Overton window.
Let’s be open-minded about and supportive of your brother’s journey of self-discovery.
Before all the new information.
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I think any chance of a criminal conviction is basically zero especially since I believe only the feds can charge.
While it was a bad shoot the current theory is his gun fired on its own. If be bought a cheap gun that malfunctioned and fired on its own then maybe he doesn’t have a civil claim. Obviously the cops are allowed to return fire. If his defective gun that he provided did the first shot then it was seem like liability is back on him. It’s reasonable for an officer to assume they are being shot at when they hear a shot.
This is basically the same as the left claiming Charlie Kirk's shooter was a Groyper/MAGA/Right and it is similarly embarrassing how persistent this theory is in right leaning spaces. Striking, really
I'm sure it'll be conclusively proven/disproven sooner or later. Has anybody involved categorically denied it happening?
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The state can still charge. The defendant can remove the case to Federal court, but the state would still be prosecuting,. just with a Federal judge and Federal jury. The advantage is that the judge would theoretically be more neutral and the jury would be drawn from a larger geographic area, but this is more of a consolation prize than anything . For instance, there would be a better argument for change of venire with a Hennepin County jury than with a jury that would be drawn from the entire district.
the state can charge but there is a problem with the federalis claiming the 'crime' was part of his job and then there is a claim to federal supermacy
Yeah, they can do that, but it's an argument and it might not win. The issue is that if he wanted to make that argument he'd have to surrender to Minnesota authorities and potentially spend a long time in prison while he waits for a hearing, at which point the judge might reject the argument. If he wants to remove the case to Federal court he'd have to file that motion and wait for the case to get on a trial calendar before he could even file the immunity motion.
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To my knowledge, the evidence that his gun fired on its own consists of:
From what I've seen, the latter point is very shaky, and is very pointedly not a claim the agency has made, to my knowledge. Digital video of this sort is not good at capturing gun mechanics at long range, poor lighting and in a confused environment. This same problem came up with the Mangioni shooting when people claimed the gun was a station-six or "welrod", as opposed to a semi-auto malfunctioning because it wasn't set up to work with a suppressor properly.
Yes the gun fired itself narrative seems to be weakening. A civil settlement though I’m not sure on. I am about 50-50 that this was suicide by ICE. I would put it at 20% chance he would have shot ICE if he had not been disarmed as the video seems to show him reaching where his gun would have been.
It’s a bad shoot in that when the shot was taken he was not a threat. But if you do his behavior 100 times you probably end up shot twice. Pay out in those situations creates a bad precedent.
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Maybe your brother is into dudes and has a type.
Don't do this
From the op:
I'm a little confused here. Is extrapolating from a point made by the OP himself, in good faith, worth a warning now? Or is it just that it's not eight paragraphs long?
Personally speaking, I'd love to see the eight paragraph long essay on my brother's type. :D
It's Friday. Maybe I'll write something in the fun thread today.
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Fair enough, consider the warning rescinded.
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Weirdly, I saw something online claiming that the images released (and being used) of Pretti in his scrubs had been tidied up by AI to make him look more appealing. I have no idea if this is right or just Internet conspiracy stuff. But it echoes all the admiration Luigi Mangione was getting, and I think for the same reasons: he's the Hero taking on the Bad Evil Wicked Horrible Guys, of course mm-mm he's so dreamy and smart and the rest of it.
Also, a lot of the protesters/resistance are heavily invested in "ICE, besides being evil and so forth, are all the dregs of society: dumb, stupid, violent, criminals or would-be criminals". They can't just be ordinary average Joes who maybe are not well-trained and a little bit incompetent, no, they have to be dumb trailer trash (and hence inferior in every way to us good people, even if I'm a Person of Hair Colour with multiple piercings and no steady employment since I finished my degree in Gender Studies Regarding Marginalised Folx in the Underwater Basket-Weaving Industry).
Why no similar feelings for Tyler Robinson, the guy who shot Charlie Kirk? Luigi Mangione packs court rooms with women who think he's dreamy. Tyler Robinson does not, nor does he even get a media air brushing.
Is it because Luigi obviously had sex with beautiful women, perhaps even threesomes, whereas Tyler was an apparent loser who could only hook up with trans women? Ick!
Let this be a lesson! If you're going to commit some high profile partisan violence, make sure you place tastefully brushed up pics of yourself all over your socials. Maybe also get some pics of yourself with cis women strippers.
Conventionally attractive males getting teen girl fanclubs despite being terrible people is… not a new phenomenon; Dzhokar Tsarnaev did, and nobody thinks the Boston marathon bombing was right.
This is more a datapoint in extended adolescence among leftist women than anything else. I suspect that if Dylan Roof had been employed as an underwear model you might have seen some of the same thing in the opposite direction.
Fair enough. I guess everyone would benefit from looksmaxxing before they do something heinous, but at the very least they should glow up their socials.
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The AI-airbrushed photos thing did happen apparently:
https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/journalism/joe-rogan-ai-altered-alex-pretti-image-ms-now-video/
https://nypost.com/2026/01/28/us-news/photo-of-alex-pretti-altered-by-ai-to-look-more-pretty-was-originally-staff-portrait-at-minneapolis-va-hospital/
Ah well, you always tidy up and establish the symbolism of your saints for the iconography. The photo being used of Renee Good is allegedly an older one, not how she looked now.
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It's weird that this has happened twice, and it's doubly weird that Oracle's brother was the one doing it this time. I'm really not sure why it's a thing for some people on the left to talk about the physical attractiveness of their heroes like this -- I thought the left would be the ones saying that your values are more important than your appearance.
But also the pattern-noticer in me is considering that this has happened only in instances where white adult men have been the grand hero of the left. I can't recall George Floyd being praised for being a dreamboat. And bizarrely the American left types who might have venerated Thomas Matthew Crooks were convinced he was a Republican (?) false flag operation (?), and anyway I guess he radiated "loser teenage boy" energy rather than "big stronk warrior man" energy.
Actually, it's startling to me how little we know about Crooks, his motivations, and the failures of the Secret Service, but unfortunately there's no force that actually wants us to know more. Despite the historically-significant photo he got out of it, Trump seems incredibly embarrassed about his near-death experience and hasn't milked it the way he should have. He seems grateful for the Secret Service despite their failure. Given everything that's happened since, Crooks' assassination attempt is one of the most historically significant events of the past 20 years.
(?) EDIT: I did some research -- I guess Crooks had been searching various political figures in the months leading up to the shooting, it does seem like he was just kind of a loser who wanted to be historically significant by killing someone. I had merged this case with the Kirk assassination case in my head, that's a more clear instance of a shooter who grew up among Republicans becoming a convert to the left due to the internet and LGBT partners, and being radicalized into political violence. That many on the left were willfully ignorant of the fact that this was a guy who grew to share their values and acted on them in an extreme and violent manner is still wild to me. "LGBT liberal from a Republican family" is a stock character. Few people would say they "weren't really a leftie."
If you (and the mods) will pardon Internet slang - ROFLMAO! That's only for the Persons of Hair Colour, don't you know? When it comes to your enemies, it is fair, correct, and accurate to say they're fat, ignorant, mentally retarded, criminals, but also useless, clumsy, incompetent, and every other bad quality, because you can tell they are bad people by how they look.
Human nature is ever-triumphant over principle, be that in religion, politics, or ordinary affairs.
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History repeated itself with Kirk's assassin.
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This gives me an idea!
Apparently in 1990, the KGB wanted to improve its image, so they held some beauty pageants and chose a "miss KGB" to represent the agency. Link. ICE could do something similar! A friendly, pretty, female ICE agent could make people realize that ICE are humans too!
Google "ice bae".
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First time I'm hearing that this is illegal in MN.
Well, damn. I fell prey to misinformation. 11 states forbid it, but not Minnesota.
How are the 1st and 2nd protected while the 1st and the 2nd can't be protected at once?
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Kash Patel said it was. It isn't.
I am shocked, shocked to find a Trump administration official saying the thing that is not.
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More than that, there were screenshots going around with a citation to a law, but it actually was for Illinois, not Minnesota.
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He was likely looking at the AI altered photo circulating that made Pretti look significantly more attractive than he did in the original, so I guess the person who made those doctored images achieved their goal with at least your brother.
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It's highly highly questionable whether this actually happened -- certainly it's an appealing narrative in some kind of Chekhov's (unreliable) Gun way, but the guy carrying it away just does not act remotely like a gun just went off in his hand.
Also shouldn't we hear it go off at the right time in at least one of the videos? People keep point to a super grainy slowed down part of the video, when there should be much clearer evidence.
At the time of the solo beginning shot (which itself is weird, they seem to shoot in threes), I cannot for the life of me see who's shooting. The guy who got his gun out isn't really angled in a good way to shoot at Pretti. The Uncommanded discharge theory just seems to fill in a lot of gaps.
Yeah to me it explains both why the agents started shooting and why Pretti decided to reach for what was potentially his weapon. A random gunshot makes sense, otherwise it's hard to see the catalyst of the escalation both ways.
And it might not have been the Sig. I remember in the Rittenhouse case, it turns out that he didn't even fire the first shot. Someone else walking by on a nearby sidewalk fired a gun right when Rittenhouse was running away from the first guy who was trying to kill him. It's not impossible something else like that happened here. With Rittenhouse, we were lucky so much was caught on video. In this case, with the scene so contaminated, we might never know.
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I saw a video where it visibly jumped in the guy's hand, but who knows if it was doctored. I think the rest of the description still works, just hearing someone say, "GUN!" in the loud chaotic environment could be enough to make some jumpy exhausted people shoot, even if the true statement was, "I grabbed his gun!"
After the shooting they were all looking around asking, "Where is the gun! Where is the gun!" so they clearly thought the gun was in play at the time.
That's not what I'm talking about though -- I've never had a gun go 'bang' when I was expecting a 'click' (or worse yet, nothing) but even an unexpected 'click' really get's your attention.
If the guy had just accidentally shot the ground next to his feet we wouldn't be doing a frame-by-frame analysis to see if the slide moved; he would have stopped what he was doing, looked at the gun in horror, etc. As it stands he just keeps running across the street; it's completely implausible that he would be this cool having just plucked somebody else's gun from it's holster and having it AD in his hand.
The agent grabbed the gun and ran away from the scuffle. Presumably he felt it is dangerous for the gun to remain in the vicinity of the scuffle so he wanted to get it away as quickly as possible. If the gun goes off in his hand, I think that a likely response is to take that as confirmation that he had to get the gun away from the scuffle as quickly as possible, and continue running.
Sometimes drivers, after trying to hit the brakes and accidentally hitting the gas instead, will mash the gas pedal into the floor as hard as they can to try to get the car to stop. When people are frightened, they often double down rather than pause and re-evaluate.
Sometimes people will freeze if they are startled or frightened. I think that’s an instinctual response to avoid attracting the attention of large predators. This “freeze” response won’t occur in a person who is already running, so it wouldn’t apply here.
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I thought he looked back, towards Pretti, but also towards where the proposed shot would have gone. Would you be more likely to look at the gun or the direction it shot? I think a case could be made for either.
Pistols are really loud, like ‘agent is now temporarily deaf and probably has permanent hearing damage’ loud. Looking elsewhere doesn’t seem likely.
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No dude -- guns are loud, when one goes off unexpectedly in your hand you do not look elsewhere first. Looking back is in fact much more consistent with the shot coming from some other gun in the area.
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I don't think this is a fair standard by any means but reminds me of the Gom Jabbar from Dune.
In the next line I said the opposite of "failure to control this reflex should be an instant kill shot." But there are plenty of people who are arrested for resisting arrest in basically this way, even if they weren't being charged with any other crime besides resisting arrest. I don't really agree with this, but it happens and people should be aware of what is expected of them if they're in that situation.
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