The killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis is a tragedy. A 37-year-old intensive care nurse is dead. His family is grieving. Nothing written afterward should lose sight of that human reality.

But tragedy does not require us to suspend judgment, nor does it obligate us to turn a contested incident into a moral lesson about masculinity.

That is exactly what parts of the media have attempted to do. In a recent MSNBC essay, Pretti’s actions were framed as a model of “true masculinity”: courage, protection, and moral clarity opposing state power. The author declared that Pretti “demonstrated an admirable model of masculinity” and concluded that “if more men were like him, the world would be a better place.” The implication is that physical intervention, even against armed law-enforcement officers during an active operation, represents the highest expression of male virtue.

It does not.

The facts of this encounter remain contested. Video evidence and official accounts diverge sharply, and investigations continue. Serious questions deserve serious answers. But the rush to canonize Pretti as a masculine ideal does not depend on those answers, and that is precisely the problem. His defenders have already decided what his death means. They have transformed a man into a symbol before the facts are even established.

This is not how we should think about courage or about masculinity.

There is something admirable in the instinct to protect. The desire to stand between........

© Washington Examiner