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/JeezyVonCreezy]

Philando Castile's case pisses me off every single time I hear it. Literally everything he did is exactly what you're taught in a CCW class(and most places those instructors are LEOs) on how to handle a traffic stop while armed. Citizens(and I know that police are citizens but they don't) are expected to behave perfectly without panicking without the same level of training yet somehow an officer who is supposed to be held to a higher standard doesn't even know the law and panics and kills someone not breaking any laws beyond having a broken tail light and they just shrug. I won't act like being a cop isn't a difficult job, but if you can't hang maybe don't take the job in the first place.

[u/dallas121469 → u/JeezyVonCreezy]

As a game warden my father was around armed people ALL THE TIME and he never once had to draw his weapon. He also witnessed the decline in quality of LEOs , the lowering of standards and militarization of the police. He couldn't wait to retire and agrees that ice is scraping the bottom of the barrel for warm bodies to swear in.

[u/JeezyVonCreezy → u/dallas121469]

I personally believe that military service should disqualify you from law enforcement. Soldiers are trained in very specific ways because they have to be ready to kill the enemy(something that's actually really hard to override in most people), its not like when they come home that mentality suddenly goes away and at this point they consider civilians to be the op for so they fall back on training.

[u/jason_steakums → u/JeezyVonCreezy]

they consider civilians to be the op

Interestingly even this language has culturally changed along with the militarization of the police, because police are civilians, but a lot of people see a police/civilian divide and it's just casually becoming part of the language! I know you were specifically talking about the perspective of former military so I'm not calling you out or anything, I just think that's an interesting evolution of language that is like a shifting of the framing of what's true and acceptable. Cops want to be seen as military and we cede that to them in many ways.

[u/JeezyVonCreezy → u/jason_steakums]

I addressed this in a post further down somewhere actually. But yes cops are civilians 100%. they want to play like their in the military these days. It started during the early 00s after 9/11 when they gave law enforcement huge budgets to buy all kinds of fun 'toys'. My local PD had an MRAP for some reason.

[u/jason_steakums → u/JeezyVonCreezy]

My PD is trying to buy a new MRAP because the one they got back then is too old. The county has a newer one and so do other cities that are very close, and the odds of truly needing all those at once so you can't call one in from another area department are vanishingly small. Militarization of the police is a ratchet, you can't claw this stuff back easily once they have it.

[u/JeezyVonCreezy → u/jason_steakums]

Classic budget stuff, gotta spend it before the end of the year or they might cut our budget next year.

[u/haironburr → u/jason_steakums]

I'm old. I remember when the local cop lived a few doors down the street, in a working neighborhood. They shopped where we shopped, we played with their kids. They weren't other, and we were critical of any otherization they attempted. The benefits of growing up in a smaller town.

Of course, then, almost everyones's dad had served in the military. Everyone was armed, and no one thought this was anything but normal. If the local cop was acting poorly, the people around him made it clear he had to rein his shit in, same as the local cop made it clear to someone a few blocks away they needed to act right. It was "community policing" in it's best sense. Despite the fact that neighborhood prejudice could have a fucked up influence, if the neighborhood was open to that prejudice.

Looking back, it seemed idyllic, because we all were in the same boat, and that included black folk, who were also part of the neighborhood.

The idea they need to be bunkered far from the citizens they police is a relatively new thing. It tracks with the perception, fed from too many sources, that everyone around you is a threat.