Guns, Interposition, and the Power of Federalism

Alex Pretti's death and the messy and necessary friction of federalism.

Molly Crabapple via Substack, used with permission of artist.

“You must first enable the government to control the governed;
and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
- James Madison, Federalist 51

[This is my third and final post in Federalism February. Read the previous posts on federalism and sanctuary cities and AI policy and let me know if there are other topics relating to federalism you’d like to hear my take on.]

I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about the Second Amendment. Growing up in suburban upstate New York, I certainly don’t come from a gun culture, but I’ve lived gun-adjacent, shall we say. We had air rifles and did target shooting at our family cabin. My dad took my sister and me skeet shooting because he felt it was important for girls to feel comfortable around guns. My husband was a semi-professional biathlete and my brother a Marine sniper platoon commander. I also teach undergrads, many from rural areas, and I’ve heard compelling arguments for the importance of guns on everything from hunting to self-defense. When my elderly grandfather was living alone in rural Tennessee, I understood why he would want a gun even though I also knew that at age 90 with a congenital shake he was much more likely to accidentally shoot himself than use it successfully for self-defense. Despite not having any personal affinity for guns, I understood why people used them and why people wanted the freedom to own them. Even more, I understood that U.S. gun culture is so ingrained that our 4D political and cultural landscape as a nation is different from other nations, making our conversations around guns distinct in important ways.

Yet I’m also very aware of the tradeoffs. Our choice to privilege gun ownership results in real human costs. Gun deaths are the #1 cause of death for children under 18, surpassing motor vehicle deaths in 2020. Gun violence is deeply regressive, harming those who are least able to escape violent neighborhoods and least able to recover, physically or economically. If I get shot in the leg while out walking my dog (which is very unlikely in my suburb in the first place), I have a flexible job and good disability coverage. A mother of three living in inner city Rochester a few miles from me is both more likely to get shot and much less likely to be able to afford the aftermath.

All this is to say I recognized gun ownership as a complex issue on which I didn’t have strong personal feelings but where I could see the legitimacy of both sides.

One area I was more skeptical about, oddly enough, was the Second Amendment’s efficacy against government overreach.

Turns out, I was suffering from a classic lack of imagination, the result, in large part, of my own privilege in living in a stable country. Part of my blindspot stemmed from thinking about government force primarily in terms of the military. It didn’t seem to me that a bunch of random freedom-fighters with even AR-15s would have much of a shot against the fully armed U.S. military.

But last month I saw that’s not how tyranny actually starts. And this is where things get a lot more four-dimensional.

Alex Pretti Is Dead

Alex Pretti’s death at the hands of ICE agents in Minneapolis gave me a stark lesson in American governance. Pretti, an ICU nurse, U.S. citizen, and licensed gun owner was beaten and then shot at least ten times after being disarmed by ICE agents after he tried to help a woman who was pushed by agents. There’s very little uncertainty this time: multiple video angles captured everything. What happened after is even clearer: DHS attempted an immediate cover-up. Local law enforcement sought a warrant to access a public street within their own jurisdiction and were blocked by federal authorities.

The death of an innocent person is a tragedy. The cover-up attempt is the real threat to every freedom we care about.

But here’s what I didn’t expect: the cover-up failed and it failed fast. And understanding why it failed reveals something essential about how we survive this moment—and why my ambivalence about the Second Amendment might have been wrong.

Federalism and Interposition

I’ve been teaching the importance of federalism to undergraduates for over twenty years. I’ve walked 18-year-olds through Madison’s careful logic in Federalist Papers 9, 10, and 51, explained the tension between enabling government to control the governed while obliging it to control itself, and diagrammed the layers of federal, state, and local authority.

Despite his outrage over the Alien and Sedition Acts, Madison was intentionally vague about how states should handle unconstitutional federal power. But he does use a critical word that gives us some idea of his intention. Madison argues that states have not only a right but a duty to interpose:

[T]he states who are parties thereto have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.

— Virginia Resolution, 1798

What does interpose mean? When I explain it to students, I use the basic definition: intervening between two parties. But more practically, it’s the power of states to place themselves between their residents and federal power.

The very idea of sanctuary cities and states is an example of interposition as a form of non-compliance, as I discussed earlier this month. Interposition doesn’t have to mean direct opposition. Madison actually rejected Jefferson’s more direct language of nullification. Instead, interposition can simply mean that states and local governments don’t directly cooperate or grant the federal government access to their resources, whether those resources are law enforcement power or judicial compliance.

Individuals can interpose too.

Alex Pretti was literally interposing when he was murdered. His last words —”are you okay?”— were to a woman he was trying to help up as he placed himself between her body and ICE agents.

Interposition is not just about states’ rights. It’s fundamental to our rights as citizens. The doctrine is intentionally vague because it includes not just open opposition, but all the subtle ways citizens can make life difficult and expensive for the government. Dropping off groceries to immigrants so they don’t have to leave their homes is a form of interposition. So is peaceful occupation of parks and so is filming government agents. Civil disobedience was a form of interpositional friction that characterized the civil rights movement, perhaps the most successful social movement in American history.

If neighborliness, associations, charity and mutual-aid are how citizens support each other directly, interposition is how we protect each other. While the former provide resources, the latter is a shield. In an ideal world, the former will be much more common than the latter, but the latter is critical to how we understand the relationship between citizens and their government, particularly in a limited constitutional federal democratic republic like ours.

Fragmented Loyalties are a Feature, Not a Bug

Both federalism and the interposition it implies create layers of power and fragments loyalties in critical ways. A National Guard member by necessity has split loyalties; this is a feature and not a bug. He or she will be motivated by patriotic love of country, but also for love of his “little platoon” of city and state, as Edmund Burke used the phrase.

The existence of fragmented loyalties is partly why most of the dystopian novels we read these days like the Hunger Games typically have a central district that produces most of the military. When men with guns are fully aligned - regionally, ethnically, and socioeconomically - with the desires of the federal government, authoritarianism runs more smoothly. There’s less friction in the gears. Less resistance to unconstitutional orders. Our constitution specifically fractured not only formal government power, but also the presence of people with guns - spreading them out and through civil society.

Interposition serves a critical second function too, which we also saw last month: it creates witnesses. When power and loyalty are distributed, so is observation. No single entity can control what gets seen. Again, this starts at the individual level, with citizens - like Alex Pretti - with phones who prevent the propaganda machine from controlling the narrative. Distributed information sources mean the government’s narrative has to compete with the narrative of those on the ground.

And critically for all of us, it’s not just individuals. Individuals alone are deeply vulnerable. It’s also local law enforcement, local and state officials, the Minnesota National Guard, and GOP members whose loyalties to their home district creates friction with their need to toe the national party line. All these people bear witness in critical ways to what happens on the ground, in ways that prevent information capture by federal authorities - or any one authority in general.

Federalism and interposition distributes loyalties, information, and (critically) weapons and force across multiple layers of government and governance. It means that power must cross not just government borders, but the borders of numerous intermediate institutions. This means that even if a national organization like the NRA, for example, is captured by government agents, there still exist a range of local and state 2a groups ready and willing to step in, which is more or less what we saw this weekend. The NRA’s fairly mealy-mouthed statement was followed up quickly by pro-2a activists, lobbyists, interest groups and citizen associations who pushed back against the Trump administration’s narrative that having a legal gun out in public is sufficient justification for being shot 10 times in the back after being disarmed.

Federalism and the 1st and 2nd Amendment Loop

What last month showed me more clearly than I had seen before is that armed citizens aren’t just a last-resort militia fantasy. They’re part of the interposition ecosystem: another node of distributed power that makes federal overreach visible and costly. They’re also, in the event of authoritarian takeover, the last protection for our 1st amendment rights (and really, every other).

This has long been obvious to everyone from the second amendment movement to the Black Panthers, but as a white suburban mom I haven’t had a lot of reason to think about the government as a direct threat until lately, despite years of being deeply skeptical about government power.

The Black Panthers’ initial use of open carry was a thoughtful response to coercive state brutality against Black Americans. It was not a provocation, per se. It was a visible way to introduce friction - a protective layer - between the brutality of the state and the bodies of Black Americans.

And that logic of the second amendment - creating protective friction - is exactly what we saw play out in Minneapolis. Alex Pretti was lawfully carrying in an open-carry state. The NRA called the Trump administration’s response “dangerous and wrong.” The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus declared the FBI Director’s claims about carrying firearms to protests “completely incorrect on Minnesota law.” Gun Owners of America said flatly that “the Second Amendment protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting—a right the federal government must not infringe upon.” Almost every state libertarian party came out with calls to abolish ICE and/or defend the rights of protestors to legally carry without getting shot.

Meanwhile, Minnesota law enforcement, the Minnesota National Guard, local and state officials, and others immediately began working through both legal and extralegal channels to access the crime scene to prevent a cover-up, to start challenging ICE in court, and Trump was forced to connect directly with Walz the Minnesota governor by phone once it became clear that the federal narrative wasn’t going to stick. Despite the FBI refusing to share information with local enforcement, local officials continue to pursue legal action to access evidence.

Cracks formed in the MAGA coalition and those cracks undermined the administration’s claims to almost absolute power over both use of force and information on the ground.

In effect, our four dimensional reality collided with one dimensional tribal loyalty. Leaders can demand that their supporters cheer for federal agents shooting citizens in the street, but eventually some of those citizens will remember that they actually believe things, that they actually have principles that extend beyond tribal loyalty. The Second Amendment people genuinely believe in the Second Amendment. Not all of them, but enough. The limited government conservatives genuinely worry about unlimited government, or at least some of them do. The “don’t tread on me” crowd eventually notices when the treading happens to someone who looks like them.

I don’t want to overstate this. Plenty of people who should know better are still performing their partisan loyalty. But the fractures are real, and they matter.

Principles, it turns out, sometimes outlast partisanship. And those principles are easiest to apply locally, to people you know, whether that’s fellow Minnesotans or fellow gun owners.

That’s the power of federalism: it fragments the single binary story about government power into all four dimensions, forcing us to weigh our party loyalties against the reality of our complex, pluralistic landscape. This fragmentation provides footholds - legal footholds, civic footholds, associational footholds - for resistance.

Complexity as Shield

Federalism doesn’t just fracture loyalties, perspectives, and coercion (and therefore power). It also serves as an escape from one dimensional binary thinking. And in the coming days it’s these four dimensional connections that will matter the most: connections of real people in real communities in real time.

There are ways we can bolster our connectedness and strengthen our ability to interpose on behalf of our fellow citizens.

To my liberal friends: join a gun club!
To my conservative friends: check out a local mutual aid society.
To everyone: find people who care about the same critical rights all Americans should care about. The rights to free speech and assembly, of a free press, of the right to bear arms, the right to be free in your own home from warrantless searches, and so on.

When I talk about the connections we need to lean on, these are the kinds of connections I’m talking about. Not abstract constitutional principles, though those matter. What we need most now are the concrete bonds between people who share a civic landscape. The county sheriff who actually knows the families in her jurisdiction. The city council member who coached your kid’s soccer team. The neighbor who shows up when your basement floods. The hunting buddy who votes differently but would still help you in a crisis.

These relationships—local, tangible, built over years of mundane cooperation—are what prevent wholesale government abuse. You can’t easily corrupt them because there are too many of them, too deeply rooted, too bound up in the daily texture of community life.

One of the geniuses of federalism is that unlike the relatively small number of people in Congress, it’s very difficult to fully capture hundreds or thousands of local municipalities and align them with federal will. And it’s even harder to align people' whose loyalties are fragmented across time and space behind a single federal vision. That fragmentation is our protection.

What We Lean On

Our institutions are more fragile than I ever expected them to be. We’re watching checks and balances fail in real time. Separation of powers is straining under pressure it wasn’t designed to withstand.

But federalism (so far) holds. Not because it’s elegant or efficient. (It’s actually kind of ugly in practice.) It holds because it’s distributed, because power is dispersed across so many nodes that capturing them all is functionally impossible and because loyalty to place and community runs deeper than loyalty to party or president.

And something else is holding too: principle. Not everywhere, not in everyone, but in enough people that cracks are forming where the administration expected solidarity. The NRA’s statement matters not because the NRA is morally pure (spoiler: it isn’t) but because it signals that some commitments survive partisan pressure.

In the coming days and months, we’re going to need those local connections and those principled voices more than ever. Not just the formal structures—the police departments and National Guard units and state attorneys general—but the informal ones. The neighbors who look out for each other. The community organizations that predate this administration and will outlast it. The local officials who remember that they serve their constituents, not the federal government. The conservative groups willing to criticize a Republican administration when it violates conservative principles.

The friction those connections create is our protection. The complexity is a shield. The cracks in the coalition are my hope.

Madison understood this. He and the other founders designed a system where ambition would counteract ambition, where power would check power, where no single faction could capture the whole.

After years of believing it in theory, I saw it in practice.

And it gives me real hope.

Your Turn

What’s your federalism story? Where have you seen meaningful connections for your local and state government? Where has it failed? What did I miss? Are you seeing cracks in partisan coalitions where you live? I’d love to hear in the comments. And if you like what you’ve read, please share and subscribe.