The NPR Politics Podcast - Minnesota shooting blurs political lines around guns

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

Alex Pretti was carrying a permitted gun when he had a confrontation with federal agents who ultimately shot and killed him. While the Trump administration pointed to his gun as a reason for agents to fear for their safety, pro-gun groups argued Pretti had a right to carry. We discuss the rhetoric around guns and how marginalized communities in Minneapolis have been increasingly turning toward gun ownership.This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef, and senior political editor and correspondent Mara Liasson.This podcast was produced and edited by Lexie Schapitl and Bria Suggs.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast for Thursday, January 29th, 2026. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And we're joined by Domestic Extremism Correspondent, Odette Yousef. Hi, Odette. Hey, Tamara. We are recording this at 105 p.m. Eastern Time. And today we're looking at how the fatal shooting of Alex Preti by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis is scrambling the political. lines around guns. President Trump's response to the shooting, specifically the fact that Predi was carrying a gun, has sparked pushback from the NRA and other Second Amendment advocates. And we're going to get into that in a minute. But first, Odette, I want to ask you about some of your recent reporting. We typically think of gun rights as a conservative cause. But that's not what you've found to be the case in Minneapolis, right? That's right. So what I've found is that there are

specific circumstances in Minneapolis specifically that have really yielded a mix in terms of who's got permits to carry, who owns firearms. And I started learning about this about a year ago, actually, I was in Minneapolis to report on how LGBTQ residents were showing a significant increase in interest in gun ownership and learning to use guns after Donald Trump was reelected. And so while I was there, I hooked to with a small outfit called Sequarity, they offer training and permit to carry classes specifically geared toward what might be considered non-traditional clients, meaning, you know, people who, because of their race or ethnicity or gender identity felt kind of uncomfortable,

showing up for those classes with more sort of traditional, conservative people around them. And so, so Sequarity, this group that I was, you know, profiling, they were dealing with a surge of interest, but really, you know, this shift, you know, they told me really had even started happening five years before that. And of course, what happened five years before that is George Floyd was killed and then widespread protests broke out. That's right. So, you know, this was something that I really came to understand more deeply when I was there is that the killing and the unrest that followed fundamentally changed. how many residents in Minneapolis look at law enforcement. You know, the neighborhood around where George Floyd was killed was basically abandoned by police.

I don't know if you remember this, Tamara, but like the precinct, the police precinct in that area was burned. The police vacated it, and then they never came back. And so those nights of unrest, there were chaos agents that were driving into that, those neighborhoods, white nationalist biker gangs coming from suburban Minneapolis and scaring people of color who lived in that area. And so people were realizing that they couldn't rely on police to keep them safe. They had to create their own safety.

And so for some, that included learning about and buying firearms. So that was a huge shift that took place five or six years ago. Well, do we have any idea of whether this is a national trend? One thing we've seen in the past is that after Barack Obama was elected, all of a sudden gun sales in red states shot up, as if Obama was coming for their guns. And I'm wondering if now what you're seeing, at least in Minneapolis, where people leaning more left are arming themselves, does that mean that this country, which is the most heavily privately armed country in the world, is getting even more? armed and potentially dangerous, or do you think this is a one-off thing in Minnesota? I think we've seen reporting that indicates that things such as the re-election of Donald Trump, you know, has caused more people from the left to learn how to use firearms and so on.

I just don't know if I can say that the growth and interest among people on the left in other parts of the country equals what happened in Minneapolis as a result of, you know, the George Floyd killing. So we've talked a little bit about who is deciding to arm themselves. But can we talk a little bit about why? What are people telling you? Right. I mean, so when I was there last year, you know, I went to a firing range with Kimmy Hall. She's the founder of that group, Secreity, that I was profiling and, you know, basically observed while she was doing training. with one of her clients. And I spoke with that client afterward.

This was a trans individual who never imagined that they would be training to own a firearm that they have children at home and don't like the idea of having a firearm at home. But because of the rhetoric that surrounded trans identity and so on in the run up to the 2024 election, they felt that it was actually imprudent to not have a firearm and know how to use it.

And so that's been kind of an interesting thing about this is, you know, that individual and the other individuals that Kimmy's told me she's been basically working with more recently are people that are reluctant gun owners. They do not want to have to take their safety to that degree upon themselves, but because they have lost faith in, institutions of law enforcement, you know, five years ago, local law enforcement. And now with federal agents on the streets there, they have felt pushed to do this. Yeah, I want to get back to President Trump's response here when he was asked about the shooting.

Trump said that Freddie should not have had a firearm at the time of his death. Now, we should say that he had a permit to carry. But President Trump said he shouldn't have had it. This is him on the Will Cain show on Fox News. I think the whole thing is terrible. I don't like the fact that he was carrying a gun that was fully loaded and he had two magazines with him. And it's pretty unusual. But nobody knows when they saw the gun, how they saw the gun, everything else.

Bottom line, it was terrible. So, Mara, what the president said there, that's not something you'd expect to hear from a president endorsed three times by the NRA. And he's not the only one, many in the president's. orbit have been very focused on Preti's gun. Right. There's no pretense to consistency here. I mean, Kyle Rittenhouse famously back in 2020, showed up to a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin with a gun. He ended up shooting three people and two of them died. He argued it was self-defense. He was ultimately acquitted, but he's become a real cause celeb on the right. But I think that when we live in this political culture of us versus them, everything is domestic terrorist versus patriot.

And it really doesn't matter. If your side is carrying a gun, that's justified. And if the other side's guy is carrying a gun, that's unjustified. I think that's really where we're at. O'Ded, do you have a sense of whether the president's statement there and others have been well received among the gun rights community? Oh, no, they have not been well received. We've seen statements from the NRA and gun owners of America, you know, to the effect of, you know, if you are lawfully carrying a gun. where you have a legal right to be, that's your constitutional right.

And the National Association for Gun Rights also took issue with the characterization that some administration officials have had around the apparent two loaded magazines that Alex Pretti was apparently carrying. You know, they were saying that that itself is also not incriminating. You know, in fact, they call it standard. So this is kind of remarkable because these are groups where, you know, folks might disagree over whether people should be outside on the streets, documenting what ICE is doing, whether that constitutes unlawful interference with ICE activities and so on. But there is no

disagreement over this question of whether the fact that PREDE was carrying a weapon, was itself an indicator of criminal intent. Yeah, I do want to say that yesterday on the pod, we talked about how President Trump's messaging around the shooting was shifting. But his administration's policies are not. And that also seems to be the case here. We've got no reason to believe that there will be a policy change around gun laws, right? No. And his message shifting, that's par for the course. His message always shifts. And right now, he seemed in the last day or two, he seemed to want to back off a little bit. But we don't know what next week is going to look like. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break and we'll have more in a moment.

And we're back. And a reminder to hit the follow button in your podcast app of choice to make sure you get our latest episodes as soon as we get them out. Odette, this shooting has prompted discussions about whether there should be changes to the Department of Homeland Security standards for the use of force. So can you just start out here by telling us what those standards are? So, you know, the department appears to be holding right now primarily to the constitutional standard, which, permits deadly force only when an officer believes that they are in imminent danger or threat or somebody else is facing imminent danger or threat. You know, there's something called the reasonableness standard, so it's evaluated based on whether a reasonable officer would assess that to be the case. But the department in 2023 under then Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, issued internal guidelines about use of force standards.

And it's an interesting document to read because it does appear to really prioritize considerations around the value of human life, the importance of considering a reasonable safe alternative to using deadly force. But this was an administrative standard that was enacted during President Joe Biden's term, and which seems to have kind of gone out the door when President Trump took office again. And how does that compare to, say, the use of force policies for local police departments or even the Justice Department? So, yeah, I mean, I spoke with a retired FBI agent who started at the FBI just a couple of months after the Department of Justice introduced its first ever department-wide use of force policy. And the reason that they had created this was in response to a deadly encounter that federal agents had had three years earlier back in 1992 in northern Idaho, in an event that has come to just be referred to as Ruby Ridge,

because that's the name of the location where it took place. It was with a white separatist family. Federal agents were trying to apprehend the patriarch of that family and ended up killing the man's wife and his 14-year-old son. A U.S. Deputy Marshall also was fatally shot. And so it led to this new department-wide use of force policy, which said that it was going to go beyond this constitutional standard, and it also required that officers need to have had no safe alternative

to deadly force in order for a deadly shooting to be justified. And so that's a standard that has been in place at law enforcement agencies that fall under the Department of Justice, so not just the FBI, but also, for example, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the U.S. Marshal service. And so it is limited in its reach. And I think at the time there was thinking that use of force policies could eventually be harmonized across all federal law enforcement agencies, but that hasn't happened. And in fact, the Department of Homeland Security wasn't established until, you know, 2003. And so we have a situation here where you have one standard at the DOJ, but then a different one at DHS. And I think therein lies some of the challenges that are being faced right now where the type of law enforcement that is being conducted by ICE agents and CPB just doesn't look like the type of law enforcement done by other agencies.

First of all, Ruby Ridge is part of the origin story of the anti-government right. And you can draw a pretty direct line from the reaction to Ruby Ridge on the right to MAGA and Donald Trump over time. The administration's critics will say that it's not just about changing the policies governing use of force, that causing chaos is part of the program, that Donald Trump wants to encourage people to self-deport. They want them scared. This is what you hear from his critics. And the big question now is this rhetorical backing off somehow going to lead to a policy change. We don't know that. That's a big question. And I think as long as the ICE agents and Border Patrol agents are told that they have unlimited immunity. There really is no reason to expect that the rules governing use of force are going to change. And that brings us to the government funding fight that is happening literally as we speak over on Capitol Hill, where Democrats are demanding changes. And there could be a partial government shutdown as a result. Democrats say that they are united behind holding up the funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which does include ICE, to try to extract changes to the way ICE and others operate. Do you think we could see standards change as a result of that?

Maybe. I mean, that would depend on if the administration feels it's in their political interest to change them and to change the whole optics around ICE's presence in these cities. because we've seen public opinion polls where immigration used to be Donald Trump's best issue. Now, majorities of people think ICE has gone too far. They don't like the way this is being carried out. They like the border being secure and undocumented immigrants with criminal records being deported. But they don't like all the chaos. And chaos is the enemy of the party in power in a midterm election. Yeah.

And we are certainly watching what is happening on the Hill. The understanding is that there are negotiations. on some level happening now between the White House and Democrats. We don't know where that is going. But, Odette, I want to go back to where we started today's pod. And you have been taking the long view in your reporting of these issues, how organizing and extremism evolve over time. Can you tell me what you'll be watching for as the situation develops? I mean, what really concerns me, and I say this also as just a resident. of a city where ICE had one of these surge operations.

You know, this was in Chicago back in the fall, Operation Midway Blitz. And so, and I did some reporting about that. And what really does concern me is that this approach that increasingly, you know, there's bipartisan agreement that it is heavy-handed is further pushing people apart and further radicalizing people. And I'm very worried that we are continuing to see this kind of failure to try to bring people together. And that just creates conditions that could really become dangerous down the road.

All right, let's leave it there for today. Odette, thank you so much for sharing your reporting. Thanks for having me. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.