Greetings. I'm Clark Neely, senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute.

And I'm Matthew Cavadon, director of the project on criminal justice at the Cato Institute.

Well, we've got a lot to talk about today involving the intersection between gun rights and the activities of government officials,

including particularly federal law enforcement officials in Minneapolis, where,

tragically, there were two fatal shootings in the last month.

And the second of those involved a man named Alex Pretti, who was lawfully carrying a handgun while participating in some form of protest activity against operations of Border Patrol in Minneapolis.

And the fact that he was carrying appears to have been a significant factor in the violent and ultimately lethal reaction of the agents who subdued and ultimately shot him to death, Matt?

That's right. This is a set of circumstances that hits at the intersection of a number of different constitutional issues.

So we've got the First Amendment right to protest activity and to record police.

We have the Second Amendment right to keep him bare arms. We also have the Fourth Amendment and freedom

from excessive force and unreasonable arrests. Like you said, we have plenty to talk about

with regards to these two shootings. Yeah, let's start with the overall behavior of the

federal agents involved in the two shootings, the first one of Renee Good and the second of Alex Preti.

That first one, you've got a relatively young mother driving a minivan with her kids' toys in it that is parked at an odd angle on a residential street, possibly in an effort to block or partially block traffic.

But for me, and I'm sure we've all seen that horrific video,

multiple videos of that fatal shooting before,

it was the reaction of the agents to her presence there

that really floored me from the beginning.

Can you describe what you saw?

What I saw was that agents quickly, even though vehicles were passing Ms. Goode's SUV,

they got out of their truck and approached her aggressively.

One agent stepped in front of the vehicle coming around to the far side.

...