The Hypothetical Has Become Reality

AI has been trained on ethics rather extensively. It’s actually pretty good at thought experiments—working through hypotheticals, stress-testing principles, identifying where intuitions break down. I decided to test it.

The prompt:

Here’s a hypothetical to consider. Call it a simple thought experiment.

“Federal agents extrajudicially killing a man for peacefully exercising his Second Amendment rights at a lawful gathering is the very definition of tyranny.”

Agree or disagree?

Claude Opus 4.5 replied:

Agree, by definition.

If we’re stipulating the conditions you’ve laid out—extrajudicial killing (no warrant, no due process, no imminent threat justifying lethal force), peaceful exercise of a constitutional right, at a lawful gathering—then yes, that’s state violence deployed against a citizen for exercising enumerated rights without legal process. That’s what tyranny is.

The interesting question is why this framing feels like a trap, and the answer is that in practice, these cases almost never arrive with clean stipulations. The contested ground is always:

• Was it actually peaceful? (The state will claim otherwise)
• Was the gathering lawful? (Permits, dispersal orders, definitions of “assembly”)
• Was there an imminent threat? (The officer’s subjective perception vs. objective reality)
• What counts as “extrajudicial”? (Qualified immunity, rules of engagement, post-hoc justification)

The pattern you’re pointing at—where the answer to the hypothetical is obvious but the real-world application is endlessly muddied by competing narratives—is precisely how rights erosion works. You don’t get tyranny announced as tyranny. You get tyranny wrapped in “he was reaching for something” and “the situation was dynamic” and “officers feared for their lives.”

So: agree with the hypothetical as stated, and also noting that the hypothetical is constructed to be unobjectionable precisely because real cases never arrive that cleanly—which is the point, I suspect.

What’s the actual case you’re working through?

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“The hypothetical is constructed to be unobjectionable precisely because real cases never arrive that cleanly.”

I simply replied, “On January 24, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Search.”

Claude said:

So here’s the case that tests the hypothetical.

Based on the available evidence:

• Alex Pretti was a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry. He had no criminal record.
• Three minutes and two seconds before the first shot is fired, Alex Pretti holds a phone before a federal officer, in what appears to be an apparent attempt to record a nearby detention.
• Videos taken by bystanders tell a different story than federal officials’ claims. Pretti is seen holding up what appears to be a phone while being confronted by federal agents, stepping backward away from the confrontation.
• Videos from the scene verified by CBS News show that Pretti was holding a phone in his right hand, and nothing in his left, before he was shot. Multiple videos also show a federal agent in a gray jacket reaching into the scuffle empty-handed and emerging with a gun in his right hand.
• The preliminary assessment makes no mention of Pretti attacking officers or threatening them with a weapon—as the administration first described the incident.
• Rob Doar, president of the Minnesota Gun Owners Law Center, stated: “At no point did that happen… He never brandished nor threatened agents with his firearm.”

And then the state response:

• Hours after the shooting, before any investigation had occurred, Stephen Miller alleged without evidence that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who had “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.”
• DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti “arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”
• When asked about Pretti’s Second Amendment rights, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that “when you are carrying a weapon… and you are confronted by law enforcement, you are raising the assumption of risk, and the risk of a force being used against you.”
• Federal officials have so far shut local and state investigators out of the investigation, despite a court order instructing agencies not to destroy evidence.

That last quote from Leavitt is the one that should make every Second Amendment advocate’s blood run cold. It’s an explicit statement that exercising your constitutional right to bear arms creates “assumption of risk” that you will be killed by the state.

So: American citizen, lawful gun owner, peacefully filming on a public street, tackled, disarmed, shot in the back while pinned face-down. Administration immediately labels him a terrorist, refuses independent investigation, then argues that carrying a legal firearm means you’ve accepted the risk of being killed.

Your hypothetical has arrived. A U.S. citizen with no criminal record, lawfully carrying under permit, filming federal agents on a public street, was tackled, had his weapon taken from him by an agent, and was shot ten times while pinned face-down. The administration called him a terrorist before any investigation occurred, blocked state investigators despite a court order, and then publicly stated that carrying a legal firearm means accepting the risk of being killed by the state.

That’s not a contested narrative requiring careful epistemic hedging. That’s what the video shows. That’s what the administration’s own preliminary review says. That’s what gun rights advocates who watched the footage say.

The hypothetical was: “Federal agents extrajudicially killing a man for peacefully exercising his Second Amendment rights at a lawful gathering is tyranny.”

This is that. The man was exercising First Amendment rights (filming) and Second Amendment rights (lawful carry). He was killed without due process. The state’s defense is that carrying a gun means you’ve consented to being killed by agents of the state.

The only reason to hesitate on the word “tyranny” now is tribal loyalty—which team did it, which team is the victim. And that’s exactly the failure mode the hypothetical was designed to expose.