Published on January 27, 2026 6:51 PM GMTThere’s a framing problem with how we talk about the ICE shootings.The conversation keeps centering on the moment of the trigger pull. Was the agent justified? Did he reasonably fear for his life? It was so chaotic! Was Pretti reaching for his gun? Did Good’s car actually hit the agent? Was Good’s goal actually to hurt the agent, and was he reasonable in believing it was? These are the questions everyone argues about, and I think they’re mostly the wrong questions.Here’s my thesis: the chaos that supposedly justified these shootings was itself manufactured by a series of bad discretionary choices made by ICE at leisure, each of which escalated the situation without obvious necessity. Asking “was the shooting justified given how chaotic things were” is like asking whether it was reasonable to crash your car given how fast you were going. “The jury claims I shouldn’t have mowed down that pedestrian, but in my defense I was going like 100 miles per hour in a school zone! YOU try not making driving mistakes under those circumstances! Human reaction times are only so fast! It could’ve happened to anyone!”The link above attempts to make this argument at length and demonstrate that it applies to the last two ICE shootings in MinneapolisDiscuss Read More
The Chaos Defense
Published on January 27, 2026 6:51 PM GMTThere’s a framing problem with how we talk about the ICE shootings.The conversation keeps centering on the moment of the trigger pull. Was the agent justified? Did he reasonably fear for his life? It was so chaotic! Was Pretti reaching for his gun? Did Good’s car actually hit the agent? Was Good’s goal actually to hurt the agent, and was he reasonable in believing it was? These are the questions everyone argues about, and I think they’re mostly the wrong questions.Here’s my thesis: the chaos that supposedly justified these shootings was itself manufactured by a series of bad discretionary choices made by ICE at leisure, each of which escalated the situation without obvious necessity. Asking “was the shooting justified given how chaotic things were” is like asking whether it was reasonable to crash your car given how fast you were going. “The jury claims I shouldn’t have mowed down that pedestrian, but in my defense I was going like 100 miles per hour in a school zone! YOU try not making driving mistakes under those circumstances! Human reaction times are only so fast! It could’ve happened to anyone!”The link above attempts to make this argument at length and demonstrate that it applies to the last two ICE shootings in MinneapolisDiscuss Read More
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