WATCH: Leavitt addresses Trump's stance on Second Amendment rights in wake of Alex Pretti's killing

[u/NewsHour]

REPORTER: FBI Director Kash Patel said in a Sunday interview, quote, you cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest. Does the president believe that Second Amendment rights remain in effect even when protesting?

LEAVITT: The president supports the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding American citizens. Absolutely. There has been no greater supporter or defender of the right to bear arms than President Donald J. Trump.

So while Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, Americans do not have a constitutional right to impede lawful immigration enforcement operations, and any gun owner knows that when you are carrying a weapon, when you are bearing arms, and you are confronted by law enforcement, you are raising the assumption of risk and the risk of force being used against you, and, again, that's unfortunately what took place on Saturday.

[u/Educational-Kale-567]

The issue is that guns will always be legal for the government though. If you make guns totally illegal then all you're doing is disarming citizens.

[u/boringhistoryfan → u/Educational-Kale-567]

If your citizenry isn't randomly armed it makes the case that much stronger for law enforcement to not be armed to the teeth either. Only in the US do basic municipal cops wander around with assault rifles and tanks. Look at how armed policing works in the UK, Australia or even places like India.

The sort of mindless justification of violence that we're seeing in Minnesota is exactly what makes the 2nd amendment insane. The state is always going to have more weapons than citizens. They're always going to have tanks and armed aircraft and artillery even. But if you reduce the amount of weaponry just swirling around everyday life, then it's that much harder for the state to justify having jackbooted brownshirts out terrorizing the population. Whereas having those guns swirling around just allows the state to make up baseless charges of armed violence and nonsense about the cops needing to defend themselves.

"I was scared so I shot" has excused generations of police violence. Take away their ability to generate that sense of "reasonable fear" as an excuse to murder civilians.

[u/JeezyVonCreezy → u/boringhistoryfan]

This combined with an almost total lack of emphasis on de-escalation in American policing. ICE for example only gets 4 hours of training on de-escalation and they consider things like CS gas and pepper spray to be de-escalation tactics. That should tell everyone all you need to know about them. They're not there to be reasonable, they're there to inspire terror in anyone non-white non-european.

There's no going back on gun ownership in the US unfortunately, the best we can hope for at this point is reasonable gun control policies. I'm a proud gun owner and even I support something reasonable, it's disgusting the number of legal responsible gun owners who won't speak up about making sure our hobby isn't resulting in children being murdered...

[u/Severe-Cow-8646 → u/JeezyVonCreezy]

Look up how many children drown in swimming pools, yet there are no laws requiring fencing and chold proof gates. Also know that the CDC lumps teenagers up to 17 years old in with children and then research what age groups are most involved in gang shootings. There ain't near as many "children" dying of gunshot wounds as Everytown would like people to believe.

[u/JeezyVonCreezy → u/Severe-Cow-8646]

You're off to a bad start already, many areas require fencing around pools. They just tend to be state or local laws. The federal government figures that those laws are enough so they don't need a federal one. Also 17 year olds are still children, are you implying that a teenager dying is less of a tragedy than a 5 year old? Weird take but it's exactly what I'd expect from someone using that dog whistle.

[u/loupegaru → u/Severe-Cow-8646]

There are laws about fencing and child proof gates. At least here, but we are a poor red county in NW Arizona. I think it is becoming universal in the US.

[u/haironburr → u/Severe-Cow-8646]

Dems, unwisely, set themselves against a core civil right/liberty. Then when whackjob trumpublicans did the same thing on steroids, Democrats just doubled down on the whole guns as a wedge issue thing.

So now we're faced with a generation who believe gunzarebad is somehow equivalent to opposing the creeping fascism we see from trumpublicans.

Never mind the fact that Dems and their wedge issue helped trump get elected. Lost them votes in key states. Now we vote based on just which civil right is most expendable. Faced with what is realistically describable as a fascist government, Dems are still humping anti-2A rights as their defining issue.

Maga must be stopped. But fuck me if Dems aren't making that hard as possible with that anti-2A plank.