Did Alex Pretti have a gun permit on him when he was killed
Executive summary
Multiple reputable reports state that Minneapolis police and city officials identified Alex Pretti as a lawful gun owner who held a Minnesota permit to carry a firearm at the time he was killed; contemporaneous videos and preliminary internal government reviews, however, raise questions about whether the gun was ever displayed, brandished, or used during the encounter [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. What officials publicly said about Pretti’s permit
City and law‑enforcement leaders announced that Pretti was a lawful gun owner with a state permit to carry: Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told reporters Pretti “was a lawful gun owner who had a Minnesota state permit to carry a gun,” and multiple news outlets repeated that characterization (Wikipedia summary of the shooting citing O’Hara; BBC reporting) [1] [2].
2. How the administration framed the encounter and the permit’s role
Shortly after the shooting, Trump administration officials portrayed Pretti’s possession of a firearm as central to justifying the use of lethal force, with senior figures accusing him of “brandishing,” intending to “massacre law enforcement,” or otherwise posing an imminent threat — statements repeated in several outlets summarizing DHS and Border Patrol claims [5] [6] [7].
3. What video evidence and local officials showed about whether he displayed a weapon
Published bystander and security videos reviewed by local and national outlets show Pretti being tackled while holding a phone and not visibly holding or brandishing a gun at the moment of the initial struggle; those clips prompted local officials and family members to say the footage does not depict Pretti holding a firearm when he was taken to the ground [4] [2] [8].
4. The government’s internal reviews and the “gun” calls during the struggle
A preliminary internal review by Customs and Border Protection acknowledged that agents yelled “He’s got a gun!” multiple times during the scuffle but the assessment did not corroborate claims that Pretti had reached for or brandished the weapon prior to shots being fired; other government documents provided to Congress and reported accounts note agents recovered a 9 mm pistol and magazines from the scene, and footage appears to show an agent pulling an object from Pretti’s waistband after he was subdued [3] [7] [9].
5. Conflicting narratives and who benefits from them
Second Amendment organizations, conservative commentators, and some Republicans pushed back on the administration’s early framing—arguing that being legally permitted to carry should not be equated with culpability—while administration spokespeople used the presence of a firearm to justify the agents’ actions; media outlets across the ideological spectrum reported these competing narratives and the tensions they produced [10] [6] [11] [12].
6. What can be stated with confidence and what remains unclear
Reporting from multiple outlets consistently states that Pretti held a Minnesota carry permit and that a firearm was recovered at the scene, supporting the conclusion that he was a permitted gun owner at the time of his death [1] [9] [7]. What remains unresolved in publicly available reporting is the precise sequence that made the agents believe the firearm posed an imminent threat — specifically whether Pretti ever drew, brandished, or reached for the gun before shots were fired — because the internal review documents and released videos do not uniformly confirm an attempt to use the weapon and some footage suggests he was not holding it when tackled [3] [4] [13].