White House Deputy Chief Stephen Miller quickly settled the issue: "A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists."

A few hours after Pretti was killed, I commented on Twitter/X: "How many of the Trump supporters cheering the killing of the Minneapolis demonstrator today would also cheer for the FBI sniper killing Vicki Weaver in her cabin door at Ruby Ridge in 1992?"

This outraged plenty of Trump supporters but the parallels between the federal killings in 1992 and on Saturday are striking.

The Ruby Ridge case—a landmark case for civil liberties and gun rights—involved the entrapment of Randy Weaver on firearms charges by an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). On August 21, 1992, three US marshals dressed in ninja outfits with face masks illegally intruded on Weaver's Idaho land and ambushed Weaver's 14-year-old son Sammy and 25-year-old family friend Kevin Harris, firing submachine guns at them as they came down a road in the woods, and killing the boy's dog. A firefight ensued that left one marshal dead. As the boy was running back home towards the family's shack, a marshal shot him in the back and killed him.

The next day, FBI snipers arrived and, within an hour of taking position, every adult in the cabin was either dead or severely wounded—even though they had not fired a shot at the FBI, and even though the FBI never called out for them to surrender. FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Randy Weaver in the back as he stood outside his shack, and then fired a shot that killed Vicki Weaver as she stood by the cabin door.

The FBI initially claimed that the killing of Vicki Weaver was justified because she had been in the front yard aiming at an FBI helicopter. After that ludicrous claim collapsed, the FBI said its sniper didn't intend to kill her.

Trump supporters insisted there was no comparison between Pretti's death and Vicki Weaver because Weaver was unarmed. But Vicki Weaver had a .380 pistol on her side under her sweater when the FBI sniper blew her head off as she was holding her 10-month old baby. Neither she nor Pretti was brandishing before getting shot to death by the feds.

Trump officials justified killing Pretti because he had a pistol—even though vast numbers of conservatives have brought pistols and rifles to protests in recent years. Similarly, the Rule of Engagement for FBI snipers was "any armed male adult observed in the vicinity of the Weaver cabin could and should be killed." In a federal appeals court ruling, Judge Alex Kozinski denounced that rule as a new James Bond "007 standard for the use of deadly force" against American citizens.

After Pretti was shot more than ten times, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said he was a "domestic terrorist" who sought "to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement." Noem announced that Pretti "approached Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol. The officers attempted to disarm this individual but the suspect reacted violently." Videos of the killing show that Pretti had a cell phone in his hand, not a gun, before federal agents knocked him down and began beating and pistol-whipping him. Trump's DHS considers videotaping federal agents to be the equivalent of a hostile attack that justifies a violent federal response.