by observationist | 2026-01-30 18:16:28+00:00
You saw a video that might have been murder. It might have been an accident. We know the gun he carried was notorious for unintended discharge. It might have been dropped and gone off, it might have fired accidentally in the agent's hand after being taken away, prompting the trained, legitimate response of law enforcement. It could have been a cold, deliberate execution if one of the CBP agents knew Pretti from previous conflicts and was antagonistic towards him. It could have been a heated, spur of the moment killing way outside the bounds of the law.

You certainly don't know - none of us have all the facts, and the investigation into it will reveal it. It's that both sides present the same facts, the same video, and tell two starkly different narratives, either of which are reasonable conclusions based on the facts that can be proven from the available evidence. What doesn't get talked about is that even with multiple videos, from multiple angles, nobody has sufficient evidence to definitively prove what actually happened.

What I do know is that it's extraordinarily stupid to get into a heated conflict with any sort of law enforcement, especially when armed, because any sort of accident or exceptional circumstance or misinterpretation of events is not going to go your way, legally and sometimes with regards to you losing your life. Pretti was in the wrong - you cannot physically interfere with and antagonize federal law enforcement. We have legal remedies to hold officers to account for overstepping or violations. He was well within his rights to record and then report the mistreatment of the woman he was stepping in to "protect", and the proper place and time to remedy that wrong is in court. If the officer was in the wrong, he'd have been held to account. Getting physical and up in the officers face and space was either stupid and ignorant, or a deliberate act intended to elicit additional violence. There's protest "training" out there that teaches people to do that sort of thing, with the intent of escalating violence deliberately, specifically for agitprop and convenient political narrative purposes.

The government has the sole and absolute monopoly on violence, for better or worse, and if you intrude on that in the slightest, you will lose.

They want the nebulous, uncertain, rorschach test incidents where they can spin an event to tell the story they want to tell, regardless of whether that story is actually true. That doesn't mean the CBP agents were in the right, nor that Pretti was responsible or did it on purpose, or that anyone involved in the whole series of events had ulterior motives. The only thing we know, until an investigation is finalized, and due process is enacted, is that we lack critical information that explains the full context and nuance of the incident. There are a metric shit ton of ways the actual story might have gone, ranging from schizophrenic break (by an agent, or Pretti) to suicide by cop, to tragic accident caused by a notoriously flawed weapon, to some other asshat, currently unknown, throwing a firecracker after the officer announced "gun", and so on. We don't even have enough information to know what's a "likely" outcome and make some reasonable Bayesian projections.

The videos we saw aren't proof of anything. They're evidence of dozens of different possible scenarios, with a wide range of likely possibilities, and dozens more we don't even know to consider without having the information that investigation will bring to bear.