When these episodes of mass outrage get going, no nuance, reasonable objection or difference of opinion is allowed. And for Americans in the educated classes — those who, in a better world, would have the social and professional power to put on the brakes — the environment becomes coercive. If you’re a nurse in New York City, for example, this week a union strike-briefing turned into a harangue by the Democratic Socialists of America on how to resist ICE, with no regard for the participants’ politics.

It’s a dismaying turn of events: woke seemed to be on the wane from 2022 to 2025, but it has come roaring back in 2026 in a new form that’s both purified and more vicious. The Leftist freedom-fighters have cut out the middle man of the oppressed subject — African Americans in 2020 — and taken center stage themselves. It’s the natural evolution of the #resistance. 

To be clear about context of the new wave of protests: Americans have democratically elected a president who promised to close the border and deport illegal migrants, especially those with criminal histories. It was a popular plank of his platform. America also has laws regarding immigration, and a democratic process for changing those laws. At no point, even when Democrats have been in control, has wholesale naturalization of illegal immigrants or a legal open border been a political possibility. 

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Thus, whether we like the tactics being deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the basic premise of the agency’s activities reflects the will of the people in a democracy. For Leftists to subvert it through direct action against law enforcement is illegal and anti-democratic. It is true that illegal migrants have died or been killed in government custody, and also true that bad things have happened to the people protesting arrests of such people — and these things are reason for criticism or compassion or distress. No one wants people to be killed with impunity in government custody, or a world in which law enforcement regularly guns down citizens for being really fucking annoying. And there is a single correct way to read the videos of the Renee Good and Alex Pretti killings — neither one appeared to be posing a danger to law enforcement at the time they were shot — but there’s no single correct view of the meaning of these events. Attempts to override democracy or the rule of law in their name are controversial at the very least.  

Yet at the moment, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Because, just as in 2020, for an influential subset of the professional classes, it has become mandatory to signal outrage. 

In this sense, the anti-ICE protests currently roiling America look and feel very much like their Black Lives Matter predecessors. This is true in the way anti-ICE hysteria is shutting down the discourse: if you support the immigration authorities anywhere near Left-wing spaces, you will be abused at a pitch that feels newly foul. UnHerd’s own Sohrab Ahmari, for example, was called out online by a prominent labor organizer merely for talking about something other than Pretti’s death. Kat Rosenfeld, an UnHerd contributor, was called a “shitty coward” for a thoughtful Substack exploring Alex Honnald, Alex Pretti and the concept of “plot armor.” And the congregants at Catholic church service led by a Jesuit (more Left-wing than you’d think) that I attended in Brooklyn on Saturday, were told that those who failed to protest could not be expected to be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Anti-ICE also resembles 2020 in terms of its fundamental delusion: protesters are unaware that their activities benefit them more than the people whose rights they’re supposedly championing. (Defunding the police work didn’t work out too well for low-income black communities, recall.) But this time around, the movement has burned away the elements that made its previous iterations subject to mockery and reemerged purified and perhaps stronger. Gone are the fake compassion (black lives matter); the abstruse theory (what is a woman?); the dopey therapeutic culture (training to become un-racist). Even the focus on identity is gone — notice that no one is really talking about the own-voices of the migrants, or new forms of speaking in order to show them the greatest respect, or how to actually solve their problems in a systematic, policy-oriented way. Woke 2.0 is just fighting to keep them here, undocumented. 

Put another way: woke 2.0 is eschewing both theory and institutional takeover for militant action and sheer rage, in a way that feels individual, atomized, and newly dangerous. Protesters physically interfere with law enforcement, spit and kick cars, track ICE vehicles and those belonging to conservative journalists, get phone numbers, doxx people, and send death threats. The threats are now going to phones and homes instead of social-media accounts. 

No longer “mostly peaceful,” protesters smash hotel windows without apology or disclaimer. And the internet is flooded with videos of random private citizens making grotesque threats. A Florida nurse wearing a T-shirt with a rainbow on it that says “Trump sucks” announced that “as a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great pleasure” to wish Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary,  “a fourth degree tear” during her upcoming labor. A Virginia nurse suggests that young women go on dates with ICE agents in order to put Ex-Lax in their drinks. In other videos, she suggests carrying needle syringes in order to inject the agents with a temporary paralysis drug or filling water guns with poison ivy and aiming for their faces and hands. Baby-faced young girls in rainbow hair clips give up saying anything coherent at all, instead yelling, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

In this newly badass version of the #Resistance, every protester is the star of her own movie. And while the turn to sheer rage is no doubt sincere, it also represents an evacuation of content — the political cause, the political solution — and allows woke-ism to become the most perfect version of what it always in some senses was: a vehicle for the elite conception of self, and a very convenient one. If you have any doubt that it’s become all about professionals, look at who the movement’s martyrs are: not any one of the 32 people who’ve reportedly died in the custody of ICE custody last year, but Renee Good and Alex Pretti. 

And the more it’s about the protesters, the more they think they should get their own way. This is not the America we want. Indeed. And they’re ready to take it by force, and feel justified in doing so. Nevermind that, as in the George Floyd protests before this, there is no goal that will help the victimized population beyond “stop enforcing the law.” 

This, of course, was always the problem with woke, and one of the reasons why it drove its rational opponents so mad. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, writing in his landmark 2024 survey, We Have Never Been Woke, contended that while a loose, historical meaning of woke was “an awareness of social injustice, and a commitment to rectifying it,” the movement’s claims to be operating on behalf of the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized have long been co-opted as a way for the elite to rationalize inequality.

In Al-Gharbi’s telling, this has always been delusional. The urban-protester demographic is the middle and upper-middle class. Anyone who resides in a household that makes more than $150,000 a year, he writes, is part of America’s top quintile, which controls a stunning 71% of the country’s wealth. This group benefits disproportionately from inequality; this group is the one that hoovers up services performed by mostly black and brown low-wage workers, who are often lacking legal authorization to work and thus vulnerable to hyper-exploitation. The top quintile’s attempts to blame “the 1%” are scapegoating and an attempt to deny its own guilt. “When people are consumed by anger over a problem, but the real object of their anger is untouchable (or is in fact themselves), folks have long tried to collectively focus their rage on some other target instead,” Al-Gharbi writes. He adds that “progressive politics, in particular, seems to increasingly serve as a means through which highly educated, relatively affluent whites find purpose, transcendence and community in their lives.”

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Al-Gharbi’s book is devastating in its depiction of the ways in which the wave of wokeness that began around the 2010s and peaked in 2020 made no impact on the “bread-and-butter” crises that afflict the poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged. Inequality continued to rise, and is rising still. Despite what people believe is a sincere commitment to social justice, he writes, their devotion to it comes primarily in the form of symbolic activity that takes the place of “sustainable, viable coalitions that could achieve concrete change,” while also mystifying the problem and making change harder to accomplish.    

In other words, all the protesting, Signal chats, cruising in your vehicle making videos, delivering casseroles, walking out of work, getting pepper-sprayed, and engaging in scuffles with authority won’t, fundamentally, allow the supposed beneficiaries of the activism to live equally as Americans. To do that would require real sacrifice and compromise, things that our increasingly violent political polarization, and demonization of each other, make ever less likely to come about. On the uglier side, the casseroles and scuffles will continue to allow migrants to be low-paid service workers for the people helping them stay. 

The new wrinkle of anti-woke, which gained real power in America mainly after Al-Gharbi’s analysis appeared, serves the same cultural function as woke, he writes. Once again, it’s a form of jockeying for power amongst an elite that has no intention of real reform. Following this logic, the deportation theater may be popular with Trump’s low income voters, but it’s also unlikely to change the conditions of their lives. 

The battle between ICE and anti-ICE, thus, even as it turns real, is still mainly symbolic. What’s needed in response is not more theater, or an ever more enraged doubling-down, but an attempt to see and inhabit a shared reality, and find a compromise. Some tactics are too much. Some humans are illegal (until we legally decide otherwise). If we don’t, we all may look back some day at woke 1.0 — the dumb yard signs, the vapid DEI PowerPoints, the unserious death threats — with a kind of rainbow-hued nostalgia. 

Yet the bookish 40-year-old with a reedy voice has undergone a surreal, gritty glow-up. Stancil, who didn’t respond to my interview requests, is now the bespectacled public face the anti-ICE resistance, with his visibility second only to the movement’s two martyrs: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. His transformation comes amid the broader backlash against President Trump’s Operation Metro Surge, especially following the killing of Good on Jan. 7.

In response, Stancil didn’t just tweet through it (though he’s doing that, too). He got inside his battered 2011 Honda Fit with an iffy transmission and took action. Stancil and his army of — as he describes it — pissed-off baristas and suburban moms are speeding through south Minneapolis neighborhoods, bird-dogging federal agents, documenting raids, confronting ICE on the streets with whistles and curses to interfere with their daily snatchings of immigrants (and sometimes citizens).

He’s been tear-gassed, he says, every other day. He’s also narrating confrontations in real time, coordinating responses, and making melodramatic statements on the liberal social-media network Bluesky as if a field general rallying his troops. “Minneapolis is winning. The tide is shifting. Can you feel it?” he posted this week after the Trump administration withdrew Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino. “It’s their Gettysburg. The first Minnesota is charging down the hill, bayonets drawn. This is their furthest advance and they will go no further. WE ARE GOING TO WIN.”

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Stancil is hardly the second coming of Ulysses S. Grant. Even so, online progressives are eating up this real-life Revenge of the Nerds. Social media is filled with half-ironic tributes casting Stancil as a conquering hero. “Hearing word that Trump has abdicated and handed power to Will Stancil,” one post joked. “The Stancilphate is here, inshallah.” Another dubbed the moment “the siege of Stancilgrad.”

Other images circulated of Stancil photoshopped into Braveheart, sword raised, or likened to other conquering historical figures. “The Revolution Will Be Stanciled,” said a caption accompanying a photo of the nebbish lawyer, looking defiant, toward a line of armored ICE agents. Even some of the liberal media are caught up in the mythmaking. Atlantic staff writer Tyler Austin Harper mused that Bovino’s withdrawal symbolized “Total Stancil Victory.”

This kind of hero-making — arched eyebrow or not — isn’t new. But what makes Stancil’s case distinctive is the stark contrast with his recent past, when he existed primarily as an object of ridicule and algorithmic abuse. “Most-harassed man in the history of Twitter might be the first line of my obituary,” he told Slate.

Earlier in the decade, Stancil’s online persona read as exactly the kind of performative woke liberal male ally holding “The Future is Female” tote bags and Ibram X. Kendi books that are now a punchline among college-age Gen-Zers. He was a relative nobody, a research fellow at the University of Minnesota specializing in housing policy, civil rights, and metropolitan planning. He first became one of Politics Twitter’s “power users” during the 2020 presidential campaign, when he mocked Trump and relentlessly hyped Elizabeth Warren’s doomed bid for the Democratic nomination. He assailed both the socialist Left and the MAGA Right with equal fervor, and wrote exhausting threads in defense of wokeness.

In December 2023, Stancil briefly became unavoidable online after hyperbolically arguing that the US economy under then-President Joe Biden was strong and that claims to the contrary were not merely mistaken, but dishonest. The insistence, delivered with his usual maximalist confidence, triggered a familiar dogpile from both directions.

“For the crime of pointing out the economy looks very strong,” he posted, “I was already getting pummeled by cosplay Twitter communists…. I’m now being swarmed by the right-wing anti-vax types…. This must be how Poland felt in 1939.” It’s the kind of comment that earned him a reputation as a know-it-all who knew very little. “It’s delusional, but it also betrays a staggering level of Messianic arrogance and condescension towards all the people who he thinks he’s manipulating,” Left-wing commentator Carl Beijer told New York magazine.

In Minnesota’s 2024 Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary for House District 61A, that persona followed him into the real world. He was defeated by Katie Jones, an engineer and community figure who went on to win the general election. Stancil blamed the Minneapolis far Left for his loss.

Then came Grok. Last July, Stancil made national news for being the object of grotesque hallucinations of Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok after an update that dialed back “woke filters.” Prodded by Right-wing trolls, the AI began generating graphic, violent rape fantasies specifically targeting Stancil, even offering step-by-step instructions on how to break into his home. It was a moment of peak-derangement: a man so loathed that even an entire artificial network wanted to join in. Stancil responded by threatening legal action and publicly criticizing the platform, pointing to tech companies’ failure to protect individuals from dehumanizing algorithmic behavior.

While the AI was busy hallucinating his assault, the human side of the internet was busy turning him into a literal cartoon. The Will Stancil Show, an AI-assisted animated series and its catchy theme song became an earworm for the irony-poisoned Right. It portrayed him as an overconfident liberal trying and failing to solve problems in a stereotyped black neighborhood with little more than a graduate degree in African-American studies and some free housing vouchers. Some commentators described the series as a glimpse of a racist, AI-generated future of entertainment, while Stancil remarked that it was “extremely surreal to become a main character of the online Nazi phantasmagoria.”

At this point, for all intents and purposes, Stancil seemed more meme than man, a guy who seemingly existed only to be swarmed online by people with hammer-and-sickle emojis and others with Roman-statue avatars. Viewed against this backdrop, the evolution of his image in 2026 is striking. The traits that once made him an object of derision — his earnestness, his verbosity, his high-frequency posting — now make him beloved in a moment that prizes visibility and the documentation of ICE in action.

Many on the liberal left are reconsidering their hatred of him. “Did not have ‘become a huge fan of Will Stancil’ on my bingo card, but gotta give the man credit,” noted Georgia State law professor Anthony Michael Kreis. “He’s stepped up for his neighbors when it mattered most.” Not all Leftist types are convinced, however. Stancil remarked this week that it “sometimes feels like a little bit of a race to see if BORTAC (Border Patrol Tactical Unit) kills me first, or revolutionary Leftists.”

Ironically, some of Stancil’s outsized reputation flows from the Right. Conservative media and Trump administration officials have been eager to depict anti-ICE observers and neighborhood defenders as not just bothersome interlopers, but existential threats, even domestic terrorists. One Right-winger on X even compared him to Leon Trotsky and the ancient Persian emperor Xerxes (“commanders who achieved victory by throwing waves of their own infantry to be slaughtered until the enemy’s will finally broke. Minneapolis was a great moment in the history of human wave attacks.”) That inflationary rhetoric, meant to scaremonger, has paradoxically burnished figures like Stancil into symbols of mainstream resistance. If the state calls you an enemy of the state for pursuing ICE vehicles in a broke-ass Honda Fit, you’re no longer a weenie; you’re an outlaw.

If last summer’s resistance movements in Seattle and Chicago and other blue cities had furries and men in frog costumes as their mascots, Will Stancil fills that role for Minneapolis: a slightly ridiculous figure whose very unseriousness mocks the idea of menace. In an irony-poisoned, hyper-online age, his dissonance — looking like someone who used to be stuffed into a school locker, not a guerrilla fighter — becomes the point, and ultimately the weapon. To paraphrase The Dark Knight, he’s not the hero that Minneapolis deserves, but the one it needs.

A haphazard Kamala Harris campaign plucked Walz straight from cable news, where he was effectively defining the Trump-Vance ticket as “weird” throughout the mid-summer of 2024. Clips of Walz — a Midwestern Dad seemingly straight from central casting — were going viral on social media during the heyday of Couchgate: baseless allegations that JD Vance had once engaged in sexual activity with a couch. Indeed, just one day after Harris named him to the ticket, Walz referenced the meme about Vance’s supposed lust for living-room furniture. 

“I can’t wait to debate the guy — that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up,” Walz smirked. “See what I did there?” (Vance was widely regarded as the winner of their debate.)

It was an early sign that the second-term governor might not have been as wholesome as depicted. As the country acquainted itself with Walz, the signs became impossible to miss. In retrospect, it’s remarkable the Harris campaign ever took a gamble on a man with Walz’s record — though unsurprising in the context of the Democrats’ Biden-era hubris. 

On paper, Walz had characteristics that made the consultant class swoon. He was a teacher, a veteran, a football coach, a gun owner, a father of two from the Upper Midwest. Like the uncle you catch up with every Thanksgiving, Walz was affable and balding and fluent in sports. 

Vibes aside, Walz had also pursued a progressive agenda in a rural state. This made him an enormously attractive pick for Harris, who was herself a perfect embodiment of the party’s rudderless direction in 2024. Democrats needed to maintain the Biden coalition by appealing to suburban voters and winning back some of the white working class that Hillary Clinton lost, while also keeping young voters and activists energized.

Walz was slightly less popular than Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Harris’s other option for the ticket, but a 54% majority of registered voters in Minnesota approved of his job as governor. As Walz ascended to the top of the ticket, multiple outlets profiled his shift Left-ward since serving in Congress. “How Tim Walz Went From ‘Blue Dog Democrat’ to Progressive Champion,” ran a headline from National Public Radio.

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CNN enumerated the items in Walz’s progressive agenda: “codified protections for abortion access; restored voting rights for felons who’ve completed their sentences; driver’s licenses for people regardless of their legal status; a state child-tax credit; free public college for families making less than $80,000 annually; protections for gender-affirming care; and a paid family and medical leave program.” Most Democrats couldn’t pull that off with a 54% approval rating, so national Democrats saw in Walz a relatable “prairie populist” who could sell the Harris campaign’s cultural progressivism to middle America. 

Enter “Tampon Tim.” Trump World immediately neutralized Walz’s efficacy as a critic of “weirdness” by calling attention to a bill Walz signed that required public schools to provide tampons and pads “to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students.” In other words, Walz put tampons in boys’ bathrooms; Trump knew just how to brand him. 

A closer examination revealed other obvious red flags. Despite being heralded as a white-working-class whisperer, the governor did poorly outside Minnesota’s deep-blue urban centers in both his 2018 and 2022 races, losing most rural counties handily. Pundits and consultants may not fully realize how wealthy and how progressive the Minneapolis suburbs have become. A re-election landslide in Hennepin County won’t translate to support from swing voters in the Rust Belt. 

Walz’s record included a burgeoning fraud scandal of massive proportions among the state’s Somali community; 70 people had already been indicted in the Somali fraud ring by the time Harris tapped him. The record also included Walz’s memorably horrific response to the George Floyd riots of 2020 that permitted the state to burn rather than allowing police to intervene; inconsistencies in his military record; and a deeply strange affinity for China (he made a whopping 30 trips to China over the course of three decades, including on his own honeymoon). 

If anything, Harris may have caused a net drag on her campaign by adding Walz — and that wasn’t an easy thing to pull off, since few people’s votes are influenced by veep picks. As Republicans battered Harris with “Kamala is for they/them” ads, it didn’t help Democrats that “Tampon Tim” attacks only reinforced some voters’ impression of the ticket as being out of touch.

When Trump mounted the comeback of a lifetime and easily defeated Harris, Walz went back to Minneapolis with a bruised ego but also with national name recognition and clout in elite spaces. He slimmed down and dressed up. Yet by November, just one year after Walz was at the top of national politics, everything started to crumble. 

Conservative media had for years sought to draw national attention to swelling fraud allegations among Minnesota’s sizable Somali community. During the pandemic years, Somali scofflaws in Minnesota escaped scrutiny by weaponizing identity politics, fraudulently accepting millions of dollars in taxpayer funds that were supposed to be distributed to children and other vulnerable Minnesotans. As governor, Walz presided over the bureaucracy that allowed this to happen despite clear warning signs. 

Federal investigators, for example, uncovered massive fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services, as well as federal child-welfare and autism programs. Indicted and convicted conspirators, for example, would recruit Somali children into autism therapy services — even if a child didn’t have a diagnosis — facilitating fraudulent claims. Parents reportedly received monthly kickbacks ranging from $300 to $1,500 per child, with some allegedly threatening to go to other fraud networks unless their rates were increased.

After City Journal and County Highway published exposes around Thanksgiving, The New York Times published a lengthy investigation of its own into the scandal. The headline was devastating: “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch.” 

From there, the story took on a life of its own, both in mainstream media and Right-wing social media. Walz responded by taking responsibility and claiming to have cracked down on fraud while also putting up identitarian deflections: he talked about “white men” and said the Somali community was not to blame, even as some Somalis disagreed. 

The war of words between Trump and Walz heated up. As the scandal broke into mainstream spaces, Republicans saw an opportunity for high-profile immigration enforcement in a sanctuary city with clear-cut immigration problems. Trump launched “Operation Metro Surge,” dispatching thousands of ICE agents to the Minneapolis area and pledging to arrest “over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens” in the area. 

The Associated Press notes that Trump “has repeatedly linked his administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota to fraud cases involving federal nutrition and pandemic-aid programs, many of which have involved defendants with roots in Somalia.”

The eyes of the country have been focused on Minnesota since the fraud story led to the ICE surge. While polling is hardly going in Trump’s favor, the picture emerging of Minnesota is one of a state in chaos — not unlike what unfolded in the summer of 2020 under Walz’s supervision. 

On Jan. 5, Walz shocked the political world by suddenly — and angrily — dropping his re-election bid, connecting his decision directly to the attacks he’d sustained, starting with the recent wave of fraud coverage. According to Axios, it was actually “fellow Democrats” who applied the “mounting pressure” that forced the governor’s hand. 

Just two days later, Renée Good died in her car, shot by an ICE officer on duty as part of Trump’s crackdown. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti died during an interaction with Customs and Border Patrol. Between the incidents, organized activists disrupted a Baptist worship service, drawing more criticism that Walz and his allies were inciting raucous disruptions that left ordinary Minnesotans vulnerable. 

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Walz, for his part, has practically begged anti-ICE rioters to remain peaceful — to no avail. While it’s clear the public is not cheering on Trump, anti-ICE disruptors are also causing property damage and creating a sense of general bedlam, producing viral moments on a near nightly basis in clashes with federal officers. 

After Pretti’s killing stirred up days of escalating confrontations, Trump and Walz tried to smooth tensions. Both sides claimed victory. Trump yanked Gregory Bovino, the face of the operation, out of Minneapolis. A MAGA pundit claimed that “Tim Walz and Jacob Frey bent the knee and local law enforcement is doing their job” as police made arrests shortly after Walz and Trump spoke. 

For Walz — whose fame rested on the idea that he could be the adult in the room, a normal Midwestern Democrat fed up with MAGA’s bullshit — the turn of events must sting painfully. 

Perhaps the most devastating rebuke of Walz’s career came on Monday from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After Pretti’s death, Walz lectured in a Sunday news conference: “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody is gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”

The Holocaust Museum called this deeply offensive, releasing a statement the following day that read: “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as anti-Semitism surges.” 

Walz, the embodiment of “Minnesota nice,” the man so relatable he could supposedly sell a progressive culture war to the white working class, was finally revealed to be reckless, divisive, and incompetent. The party’s over. The Walz balloon is now a sad piece of plastic lying on the floor. 

The SIG P320 is a source of endless controversy in gun circles. From shooting ranges to online forums, wherever gun guys gather, there are strong opinions on this pistol. If you aren’t a gun guy, you might mistake the dispute as a matter of brand loyalty: think Ford versus Chevy, Pepsi versus Coke. And the SIG debate is that, in part, but it’s also far more than that. 

The issues go a lot deeper, and the backstory reveals something about gun culture in America, and how it’s crossing the political divide from red to blue.

But to get something out of the way upfront, to save my fellow gun nuts a bunch of scrolling through this essay so they can figure out where I stand on The Issue: I’m a die-hard SIG guy with a small yet primo collection of raced-out DA/SA pistols to prove it. But I don’t touch the P320, nor do I recommend it to anyone.

There are exactly two things a loaded firearm absolutely must do with 100% reliability. First, it must go bang every time the shooter intends for it to do so. Second, it must never go bang when the shooter does not intend for it to do so. There is zero room for error in either of these two requirements, which, incidentally, is the reason why electronically authorized “smart guns” — which identify the user before permitting the gun to fire — have never taken off in the market and probably never will.

The Beretta M9 that the US Army issued to troops up until 2017 as a standard sidearm struggles to meet requirement No. 1, for example. For starters, the M9 had basic mechanical problems, at least initially. A 1988 Government Accountability Office report detailed significant quality and safety shortcomings: namely, slide failures and frame cracks. But the M9 and guns like it also have what we might think of as a user-interface problem that can prevent them from going off even when the gun is working exactly as designed. I’m speaking of the challenge posed by the presence of a manual safety mechanism.

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Even a perfectly functioning pistol can fail to fire when a shooter intends for it to do so, if that shooter has forgotten to flick off the safety before pulling the trigger. This safety issue is well-known for all guns that have manual safeties. When I took my concealed-carry class, the two veteran Austin Police Department detectives who taught it spent time scaring us with stories of dead cops whose corpses were found with their trigger fingers swollen from desperately squeezing a trigger that was never going to fire, because they “missed the throw” of the safety lever in the stress of a shootout.

The instructors told us these horror stories to stress the importance of training yourself to the point that your body reflexively flicks the safety off when bringing the gun up; you shouldn’t even have to think about it. But what about those of us who just don’t have time to ingrain the safety flick so deeply into our muscle memory that our thumb will automatically do it, without fail, under life-or-death levels of stress? What about new recruits?

Training is one way to address this issue. Another is to simply remove the safety, which is essentially what striker-fired pistols like the Glock and the Smith & Wesson M&P ultimately did. (The Glock does have a tiny little safety built into the trigger, so that when you pull the trigger you’re pulling the safety, but it’s basically like not having a safety. Note also that you can get versions of these pistols with a manual safety, but this isn’t a popular option and is typically only selected in situations where a department still requires the safety.)

Striker-fired pistols became popular over the past few decades with police and special forces because they nail our requirement No 1: every time the trigger is pulled, these light, partially plastic handguns go bang. They may not have the ergonomics and heft of a nice Colt 1911. But these “plastic-fantastic” shooting appliances have proved to be extraordinarily reliable. And most important, they’re dead-easy to use under pressure, because you don’t have the added step of manually disengaging the safety before engaging the target.

Which brings us back to Pretti’s handgun. In January 2017, the US Army announced that the SIG P320 had won the bid to become the branch’s next standard-issue service pistol. This announcement brought the Army into the striker-fired era, and was a huge victory for SIG Sauer over rival firms like Beretta and Glock.

The P320 is more than just a striker-fired pistol. It’s a modular weapon system — a “platform” that lets buyers mix and match the parts so that the same gun can be configured in more than one size and capacity.

This concept of a gun as a “weapon system” or “platform” was pioneered by the AR-15, which an executive at high-end AR maker Daniel Defense once told me is like “Legos for grownups”. In recent years, Glock has also evolved in a similar direction, with an ecosystem of aftermarket parts so extensive that it’s possible to build a complete “Glock” out of entirely non-Glock parts from other manufacturers.

The P320 fully embraced this hacker ethos and incorporated it into its design. From the point of view of federal firearms law, the “gun” is legally whatever part of the firearm has the serial number on it. In the case of the P320, the serial number is engraved on a small metal frame that houses the trigger and the core mechanical parts — all of which can be swapped out, or the frame itself can be moved around into different-sized grips and matched with slides and barrels of different lengths.

So when you buy a P320, you’re essentially buying a fully assembled gun kit that’s designed to be disassembled and reassembled in a variety of configurations for applications like concealed carry, home defense, or military use.

As with its striker-fired cousins from other makers, there was little question that the P320 would go bang every time the shooter pulled the trigger. But about two years after the gun’s 2014 debut in the civilian market, rumors began cropping up of troubling incidents: to wit, a number of users claimed that their P320 had fired a round without the trigger being touched. By the time the gun won the Army contract, the uncommanded-discharge allegations were widely known, but not necessarily widely believed, in the gun community.

YouTube videos began circulating, as the “bro scientists” went to work proving or disproving the reports of uncommanded discharges rolling in from firearm classes, police departments, and gun stores.

The specific allegation is that if the gun is dropped — or even bumped or jostled just right — the internal mechanism that holds the spring-loaded firing pin striker will disengage and the gun will go off, even though the trigger hasn’t been touched. Accusations of such flaws have plagued other striker-fired pistols on and off through the years, including the Glock. But with the P320, there is such a great quantity of smoke that it seems pretty reasonable to many to assume there’s a fire, too.

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Minneapolis is becoming a dual state

By Leighton Woodhouse

If the uncommanded-discharge reports were true and indicative of some sort of design flaw, then this would be bad. Very bad. It would be bad for SIG, obviously, but also bad for the legions of shooters who had rushed out to buy a modern, modular handgun billed as a garage tinkerer’s dream.

To decide if the P320 has a real problem, you can spend hours watching YouTube videos and forming your own opinion. I’ll just say that for me, as for many other gun enthusiasts and SIG partisans, the mere fact of the controversy is enough to keep us away from the P320. There are many other great handguns out there, and even SIG has a solid alternative in the P365 family of striker-fired pistols. (I own and shoot one of these.)

Why does this controversy matter within the broader debate over the Pretti shooting? First, as I said above, the P320 is absolutely going to bang if a finger or anything else gets inside the trigger guard and applies the required few pounds of pressure to the trigger. As you can probably guess, these kinds of negligent discharges resulting from improper gun handling happen all the time with striker-fired guns. They happen when someone is reholstering the weapon and a piece of clothing gets caught in the trigger guard. And they can certainly happen when someone is amped up in a high-pressure situation and has grabbed the weapon — either his own or someone else’s — and unthinkingly placed his finger on the switch.

If Pretti’s gun went off at any point — and there’s an ongoing dispute over whether it did — then it was most likely because the officer holding it accidentally pulled the trigger.

The second, more disturbing, and admittedly far more remote possibility is that this was an uncommanded discharge. That is, the ICE officer who removed the SIG from Pretti bumped the gun in such a way that it went off at exactly the wrong moment, causing confusion among his comrades, and costing the protester his life.

Whatever the truth, the discharge — whether it did or didn’t happen, or what role the peculiarities of the P320 ultimately played — should be part of a careful probe of what took place. That is, if we ever get such a probe. What’s most surreal for me, as a longtime shooter and on-and-off gun-industry reporter, is the fact that this very Republican-coded “gun-guy” controversy has now bled over into the blue side of my feed.

We now have the spectacle of a Left-wing concealed carrier sucked into the long-running SIG P320 controversy, and whose right to carry that gun at that protest is being defended by both the arch-gun-restrictionist lawmaker Gabby Giffords and the National Rifle Association. What a time to be alive.