What to Know
There are some gun safety rules that you just follow, whether you are the secretary of Homeland Security or not. But tell that to Kristi Noem, who is seen in a video flanked on either side by a border patrol agent, with a high-class weapon in her hands. It’s not clear if the gun is an automatic or semiautomatic, but it looks powerful, and she’s holding it with two hands.
But the kicker is, as many point out in the video on X (formerly Twitter), it looks like Noem is inadvertently pointing the gun at the agent on her left. The muzzle of the gun is pointed up at an angle, so much so that if it were to accidentally go off, it might shoot right at the man’s head. But Noem doesn’t change positions for the entirety of the video, and people have a lot to say about it.
Kristi Noem even has her finger near the trigger in the video.
🚨BREAKING: Kristi Noem is absolutely getting DRAGGED for this video where she points her rifle directly at an agents head.
— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) January 29, 2026
A muzzle is NEVER supposed to be pointed any anything when not a target. They all have shit training and it starts from the top.
pic.twitter.com/hoPD2QWPBf
The post on X with the video explains, “A muzzle is NEVER supposed to be pointed [at] anything when not a target. They all have [s—] training and it starts from the top.” It’s clear that Noem is holding the gun as a way to exert her power. The agents stand on either side of her with their own weapons, but the one on her right does not have his gun out. So you have to think that, on some level, they knew that Noem shouldn’t be holding her weapon as she does in the video.
“Here we are with Marco and Ryan today,” Noem says in the video. “They’re letting me roll with them. We’re gonna go out and pick up somebody who I think has got charges of human trafficking.” She then says that there was an operation before that where agents took someone into custody who was wanted for murder.
But what Noem says isn’t really what interested other users on X.
Instead, it was the fact that Noem is holding the powerful firearm with one hand around it and another dangerously close to the trigger.
In fact, one user commented, “Trigger discipline is terrible, too. Her trigger finger isn’t indexed to the frame’ it curls around the grip, making it easy to accidentally grip the trigger.”
Others wrote that they believe the perception of the way Noem and the agents are standing is hard for some to see in the video. Per those users, Noem’s muzzle is not close enough to the agent’s head to be any real danger to him, should the gun go off. But not everyone is so sure about that.
“This isn’t ‘tough.’ It’s reckless cosplay with a lethal prop — pointing a rifle at your own agent like the rules don’t apply to the camera,” someone wrote in the thread. “In serious agencies, muzzle discipline is sacred. Here it’s vibes, vanity, and a photo-op.
That’s the Trump era in one frame: uniforms as costumes, guns as accessories, responsibility as an inconvenience. If you can’t handle the most basic safety rule…why should anyone trust you with power?”
