Gun Rights Advocates Excoriate Trump After He Says ‘You Can’t Walk In With Guns’

President Trump likes to cast himself as the protector of the Second Amendment, but conservatives and firearm advocates are suggesting the title may no longer fit after comments he and members of his administration made this week suggesting support for stricter limits on where Americans can carry firearms. On Tuesday, in the wake of the shooting of a 37-year-old American citizen at Minneapolis, Alex Pretti, Mr. Trump told reporters, “You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t. You can’t walk in with guns. You can’t do that.”“I don’t like that he had a gun. I don’t like that he had two fully loaded magazines. That’s a lot of bad stuff,” he said. His remarks have Second Amendment defenders up in arms. Mr. Trump is “clearly not the most pro second amendment President anymore. He’s closer to Biden than Bush,” a contributor to National Review, Pradheep Shanker, said in a social media post.“The Second Amendment protects the individual right to carry a gun outside the home for self-defense—including at protests,” the Firearms Policy Coalition said in a statement. “The mere presence of a firearm does not erase a person’s rights, does not turn lawful conduct into wrongdoing, and does not make someone fair game to be arrested or killed for the government’s convenience,” it continued. A conservative commentator and firearms video entertainment creator, Shermichael Singleton, in a lengthy post on social media, eviscerated the president’s stance that location has limits.“There are states led by Democrats that are doing everything they can to encroach on people’s Second Amendment rights. To have a Republican administration giving them fuel by regurgitating some of the same ludicrous anti-2A talking points is a slap in the face to gun owners,” he wrote. Like Minnesota, several states, including those with less restrictive gun laws, limit the carrying of firearms in “sensitive locations” such as courthouses, schools, and government buildings. However, it is legal in the North Star State and many others to carry a firearm during a protest. Mr. Singleton also criticized FBI Director Kash Patel’s assertion that Pretti’s decision to have two loaded magazines was evidence that he was planning to engage in violence. The position is simply “false,” he wrote. It is “effectively pro-magazine capacity limitation.” Even before this week’s shooting, Mr. Trump’s comments about guns have raised alarms among gun rights groups. Though he repeatedly promised to “save the Second Amendment” during his presidential campaigns, in 2018, Mr. Trump suggested that officials should “take the guns first, go through due process second” when concerns are raised that a firearm owner is unstable or may commit an act of violence. Gun control advocates have suggested that carrying a firearm in public makes communities unsafe. They point to increased incidences of legal guns being stolen for use in crimes, less firearms safety training in permitless carry states, which creates increased opportunities for armed intimidation and shootings, and greater likelihood of mistaken threat assessments in encounters with police. “Scientific research” and “basic common sense” show that “when it is easier for people to carry guns in public, violent crime rates go up,” says an organization that advocates for gun control measures, Everytown.Yet a study by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that states with concealed carry permitting laws that require live firearms training and deny permits to applicants convicted of violent misdemeanors do see reductions in violence. Conversely, states that adopt permitless carry without firearms training experienced a 32 percent increase in gun assaults.At the same time, firearms-related crimes overall are on the decline. The nonpartisan think tank, the Council on Criminal Justice, found that murders in America’s 35 largest cities, including non-firearm-related homicides, were down 21 percent in 2025 compared to 2024, marking the lowest rate since 1900. Over the same period across 11 cities where data were available, the average rate of gun assaults was down 22 percent.But the data on crime in cities with open and concealed gun carry laws is conflicted. In all 11 cities studied, concealed carry is permitted, either with or without a permit while five cities also allow open carry, with only one requiring a permit. Two of those four permitless open-carry cities — Milwaukee and Little Rock, Arkansas — were among the few cities that saw homicide rates rise from 2024 to 2025. The percent of homicides committed with firearms in those cities is unreported in the data.Officials initially claimed that Pretti intended to “inflict maximum damage,” an assertion seemingly undermined by a Department of Homeland Security report obtained by NBC News. The report notably excludes earlier administration allegations that Pretti brandished his firearm at agents.The report says that officials tried to detain Pretti, which led to a struggle. During the struggle, a Border Patrol Agent yelled multiple times, “He’s got a gun!” Seconds later, federal officers fired the shots that killed Pretti. A video of the incident shows an agent disarming Pretti before he was shot. A former NRA spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, acknowledged that interfering with law enforcement actions could get a gun owner killed. “You can walk in with guns, you just can’t stand in the street, block traffic, and get in the way of LEO while doing it. Not rocket science.”But Second Amendment groups argue that it not inherently wrong to carry a firearm nearby law enforcement. “The notion that merely being armed around law enforcement in and of itself means you have ill intent is categorically false. Millions of gun owners have and will continue to peacefully protest in the presence of law enforcement,” Mr. Singleton said.The president of the National Association for Gun Rights, Dudley Brown, agreed that interrupting police action is verboten, but he too criticized the president for suggesting that a protest should be off-limits to individuals carrying.“You absolutely have the right to carry the tools for self-defense while lawfully protesting,” he said. “In fact, that’s precisely the kind of place where exercising that right matters most.” “President Trump and his Administration—much like the anti-carry states we fight every day—must remember that government exists only by the consent of the governed, and that our rights are not subordinate to their policy preferences,” the Firearms Policy coalition said.

Gun Rights Advocates Excoriate Trump After He Says ‘You Can’t Walk In With Guns’

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