Alex Pretti

 Say his name.

Alex Pretti, an intensive-care-unit nurse at the veterans' hospital in Minneapolis, was peacefully protesting Immigration and Customer Enforcement agents in the city when he saw about half a dozen of them beating up a female protestor.  Pretti quickly moved to help her and shield her from the ICE agents, who noticed the holster on his person and disarmed him of his gun by force.  Then they beat him up when he tried to shield the woman further and then shot him nearly eleven times.  He may have already been dead from the blows he sustained before they fired a single bullet.

The Department of Homeland Security refused to let local law enforcement investigate the killing of Pretti and labeled the dead man a "domestic terrorist."  Pretti, in an eerie coincidence, was the same age as Renee Nicole Good - 37.   

If the killing of Renee Nicole Good was seen as an isolated incident, and if it didn't make clear to enough people that this the new reality in America, than this killing certainly did.  If it wasn't obvious before, it's obvious now: Donald Trump has made dissent a capital offense.  He's just foregoing the ritual of show trials and public hangings.

This has to end.  Not just ICE killings, not just ICE itself, but the entire Trump administration.  Alex Pretti was doing a very Christian act by coming to the aid of a stranger in the tradition of the Good Samaritan, and he was legally permitted to carry the gun he had on his person (a gun he never brandished), meaning he was illegally disarmed.  He was brutalized and murdered with the sort of violence that is commonly associated with 1980s action movies.  Now ICE hopes to go after the people who got the Pretti murder on video, because Homeland Security counts them as "domestic terrorists."  Even the woman Pretti was trying to help fears for her life because she is afraid that she could be eliminated as a witness.

It's time for the Democrats to step up. Some of them already have.  Several moderate Democrats in the U.S. Senate who had been considering ICE funding in the appropriations bills that need to be passed to avert a government shutdown are now planning to vote against .  The seven House Democrats that already did vote for ICE funding are likely to regret it now - as they'll likely get primaried.  If the Democrats don't join the people in fighting back against Trump, they'll live to have even greater regrets.

And, given what is happening now in Minneapolis and what unfolded in Davos last week, and given that so many people are outraged that Trump has even lost the National Rifle Association because his ICE storm troopers violated Alex Pretti's Second Amendment rights, it's clear that the United States cannot go on.  Once again, I call for the dissolution of the United States.  I remain a secessionist. 

Who Killed John Lennon?

When John Lennon was murdered thirty years ago today, I remember some angry reaction from the British public toward the United States. The general consensus was that the murder could have only happened in America, given this country's lenient gun laws, and that New York, where the murder took place, bore the shame of the murder more than the loss of the victim. Yoko Ono responded by urging non-Americans not to bash the U.S. in reaction to her husband's murder, because "there are cranks everywhere."

Well, Yoko Ono is entitled to her opinion, of course, and she's also free to express it, and I respect her for that, but I'm sorry, I'm with the Brits on this one. Yes, there are cranks everywhere, and the intruder who attacked George Harrison with a knife at his home in England in 1999 proved that, but in America, a crank, like the one who killed John Lennon, was able to buy a gun. The United States has more firearm murders than all the other Western nations put together, and our appalling approach to regulating firearms that allows anyone to buy a gun only feeds the culture of violence in this country. We are a nation that romanticizes firearms, from the beatification of gunfighters in Hollywood Westerns to the braggadocio of hip-hop stars packing heat.

And so, to my fellow Americans, I say this: Our laissez-faire attitude toward guns enabled a psychopath who had no business owning a gun to purchase one, stand outside the Dakota apartment building in New York, and shoot John Lennon in cold blood, in a city Lennon thought he was safe in. We are to blame for his death. We created the conditions that made it possible for someone to shoot him dead. We let this happen.

I was going to hold my tongue on this issue, but then John Lennon always spoke his mind and always encouraged others to do the same. I can think of no better way to remember him.