A Culture of Violent Entitlement

[Content Note: Guns; threats.]

A young white man in Rosemount, Minnesota, was teaching his daughter to ride a bike along their residential street when one of their neighbors, an older white man, started shouting at him that he was doing it wrong. And then:

The father told Fox 9 News he's still shaken by the encounter. He explained that when he and his daughter got down to the cul de sac, [Gary Drake, 61] began yelling from his porch. When the father responded to say, "I've got it," Drake allegedly said, "If you don't like my advice, get off the street."

At that point, Drake appeared to get angrier -- but as the father and daughter prepared to leave the area, Drake allegedly went inside his home, grabbed a Remington 870 shotgun, pointed it at the father and threatened to kill him.

Drake's wife eventually came out and pulled the gun away, but police said he didn't appear repentant when he was booked. In fact, he allegedly told officers, "Maybe next time. I should have shot him."

Naturally, Drake is being described as having "snapped."

But this—If you don't like my advice, get off the street—doesn't come from nowhere. And the idea that people you see as your inferior (via age, or race, or gender, etc.) need to disappear if they refuse to take your instruction is not a concept created by mental illness, but by a culture of violent entitlement.

We cannot keep pretending that every single one of these incidents, of threats of violence and/or actual violence, that are clearly underwritten by a sense of ownership of other people and the spaces in which those people move, is an isolated incident, unconnected from all the rest.

We have a very serious problem of armed men, white or white-identified, who think they own "the streets" and are empowered to violently control the people who inhabit them.

This isn't madness. It's undiluted, unexamined, toxic privilege.

[H/T to Shaker GoldFishy.]