Some Bullets Are More Equal Than Others: How Power Decides Who Deserves Mercy

An editorial illustration contrasting two women killed by state force—one glorified, one vilified, symbolizing America’s selective justice and politicized morality.

Some Bullets Are More Equal Than Others

In American political life, death is rarely allowed to remain merely tragic. It is recruited, styled, captioned, and deployed. Some lives are lacquered into legend; others are flattened into cautionary tales. The difference is not always what happened, but who the story is for—and who gets to tell it.

Consider the parallel fates of two women shot by agents of the state, five years apart, on opposite ends of the American looking glass.

Renee Nicole Good

(Shot January 7, 2026)

Renee Good did not arrive in Minneapolis with a slogan or a megaphone. She arrived with three children, a suitcase of books, and a life already marked by loss. Thirty-seven years old, recently relocated from Colorado, she was a U.S. citizen whose résumé read less like a radical’s manifesto than a modern American patchwork: dental assistant, credit union employee, award-winning poet.

Her writing had once earned her the Academy of American Poets Prize while she was an undergraduate at Old Dominion University, a detail that would later feel almost cruel in its irony. Poetry, after all, is the discipline of attention. It requires watching closely, naming what power prefers remain vague.

She was a mother, of a teenager, a pre-teen, and a first-grader—and a widow. Her second husband, comedian Tim Macklin, had died in 2023, leaving behind the quiet wreckage grief always does. Friends describe a woman holding things together rather than tearing them apart. Even the internet version of Renee, social media bios that announced her as a “wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer,” a pride flag emoji tucked beside a Bible, suggested contradiction rather than militancy. A devoted Christian who had gone on youth mission trips to Northern Ireland. Not an activist, according to those who knew her. No criminal record beyond a traffic ticket.

On January 7, federal agents surged into her South Minneapolis neighborhood. ICE vehicles. Tactical units. Weapons. Authority, unambiguously armed. Officials would later describe Renee as a “legal observer,” a civilian monitoring federal activity, precisely the kind of role one might expect from a poet, someone trained to look and record rather than intervene. Her mother would say she was likely terrified by the sudden militarization of her street.

She was shot anyway.

Within hours, the story hardened. Renee Good was no longer a mother or a writer or a woman caught in a frightening moment. She was, according to the President of the United States, a “domestic terrorist.” A “professional agitator.” Trump claimed she had “weaponized her vehicle” in an attempt to run down an ICE agent, an assertion her family and witnesses dispute, and one still contested as evidence continues to emerge.

Nuance never survived the first press briefing.

Ashli Babbitt

(Shot January 6, 2021)

Ashli Babbitt, by contrast, traveled toward history rather than being overtaken by it. Thirty-five years old, an Air Force veteran from San Diego, she arrived in Washington, D.C., with intent. Fourteen years in uniform, eight in the National Guard and Air Force Reserve had taught her to believe in hierarchies, missions, and orders. She had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. She co-owned a pool-supply business with her husband. She had once voted for Barack Obama, then turned sharply, passionately toward Donald Trump in 2016.

By 2021, her social media presence was a thicket of “Stop the Steal” slogans and QAnon-inflected certainties. She believed the election had been stolen. She believed she was answering a call. When the crowd breached the Capitol, Ashli followed it inside. When she climbed through a shattered window toward the Speaker’s Lobby, past barricades, past armed warnings, she was shot by Capitol Police officer Lt. Michael Byrd.

Her background was not without turbulence. Court records show that in 2016, after a vehicular confrontation, a woman named Celeste Norris obtained multiple peace orders against Babbitt for stalking and harassment, though Babbitt was acquitted of criminal charges. These details mattered little to the mythology that followed.

Almost immediately, Ashli Babbitt became something larger than herself.

The Presidential Lens

Donald Trump’s reactions to the two deaths did not merely reflect political differences; they revealed a governing instinct.

Ashli Babbitt was canonized. Trump called her a “patriot.” A “martyr.” He fixated on the officer who shot her, branding Lt. Byrd a “murderer,” and transformed her death into a foundational grievance of the post–January 6 movement. In 2025, his administration authorized a $5 million settlement to her family, an extraordinary gesture that read not merely as sympathy, but as vindication.

Renee Good received no such grace. Trump dismissed her humanity with the efficiency of a talking point. “Domestic terrorist.” “Agitator.” He framed her killing as an unambiguous act of self-defense by federal agents, a necessary exertion of force in the face of supposed chaos. There would be no elegies, no settlement, no public doubt extended on her behalf.

One woman breached the seat of American government in service of a lie about democracy and was remembered as a hero. Another stood in her own neighborhood, watching armed agents roll in, and was posthumously recast as a threat.

Who Gets to Be Innocent

The difference is not merely partisan. It is aesthetic, moral, and deeply American.

Ashli Babbitt’s story fit a narrative Trump wanted to nourish: the betrayed believer, the loyal soldier, the woman who died for him. Renee Good complicated everything. She was inconvenient. A Christian mother with a pride flag emoji. A poet mistaken, or misrepresented as a militant. A civilian whose death raised uncomfortable questions about federal force turned inward.

In death, both women were conscripted. One into sainthood. The other into suspicion.

And somewhere beneath the slogans and settlements, three children lost their mother, a husband lost his wife, and a country once again proved that in America, the afterlife of a life is often more political than the life itself.

The Two-Tiered Afterlife

The contrast between President Trump’s rhetoric regarding Ashli Babbitt and Renee Nicole Good reveals a strikingly elastic approach to federal law enforcement’s use of force, one that bends depending on whether the death aligns with the administration’s political objectives.

Critics and local officials have described the vileness of this contrast as evidence of a “two-tiered system of justice,” in which the same act, a federal agent shooting an unarmed woman—is treated as either “murder” or “heroic self-defense” depending on context, constituency, and usefulness.

The Labels: “Martyr” vs. “Terrorist.”
Trump’s language does not merely describe; it transforms. Babbitt is rendered an “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman,” her military service foregrounded, her physical slightness emphasized, her death reframed as proof of a government turned against its own. Good, despite a background devoid of violence, is recoded as menace. By labeling her a “professional agitator” and “domestic terrorist,” Trump converts ambiguity into certainty and grief into justification. The label does the work the evidence has not yet finished.

Law Enforcement, Selectively Defended.
The President’s posture toward police authority fractures along political lines. Capitol Police are portrayed as corrupt when their force is used against Trump’s supporters; ICE agents are valorized when force is used in service of his policies. Lt. Byrd becomes a villain; an unnamed agent in Minneapolis becomes a hero “fearing for his life,” exonerated rhetorically before investigations conclude. Doubt, it seems, is reserved for enemies.

The Legal and Financial Signal.
Rhetoric hardens into policy. The $5 million settlement paid to the Babbitt family reads, to critics, as an implicit rebuke of the officer’s decision. In Minneapolis, by contrast, the administration has moved swiftly to defend the operation itself, with senior officials publicly pre-clearing the agent of wrongdoing even as federal and state investigations remain open. Justice, here, appears not blind but pre-briefed.

Why Critics Call It Vile.
Local leaders in Minnesota have called the contrast propaganda—an exercise in weaponized sympathy. Babbitt’s death is used to argue that women must be protected from the government; Good’s death to argue that the government must be protected from women. The coding is not subtle. One death occurred in service of keeping Trump in power. The other occurred amid an immigration crackdown in a diverse neighborhood, a cornerstone of Trump’s 2026 agenda.

This is not merely inconsistency. It is narrative discipline.

In the end, the question is not which woman “deserved” to die, no one does but which death is permitted to trouble power. In modern America, innocence is not discovered; it is assigned. And once assigned, it determines everything that follows.

Why It Matters

This essay exposes how state violence is not judged by facts but by usefulness. When identical acts are reframed as either “heroic self-defense” or “murder” based on political alignment, justice ceases to exist as a principle and becomes a narrative weapon. Democracies do not collapse only through coups, they rot when power decides whose death deserves grief and whose deserves suspicion.

Key Takeaways

State violence is morally reframed based on political allegiance, not evidence.
One woman was canonized for serving power; another was demonized for complicating it.
Language (“martyr” vs. “terrorist”) replaces due process and forecloses accountability.
Federal force is defended or condemned selectively, revealing a two-tiered justice system.
Innocence in modern America is assigned, not discovered.

Some Bullets Are More Equal Than Others: How Power Decides Who Deserves Mercy