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 the vulnerable and those who might harm them is not contemptible; it is the seed of real virtue. But seeds are not harvests. An instinct becomes a virtue only when it is shaped by judgment, constrained by prudence, and tested against consequences. What we are being asked to celebrate is instinct alone.
Masculinity, properly understood, is inseparable from judgment. Courage without judgment is not virtue; it is recklessness. Across classical ethics, religious traditions, and civic life, strength has always been associated with self-command. The strongest men are not those who act on impulse but those who understand when restraint is the higher form of courage.
I have written elsewhere about what I call “sacred masculinity” — not in a theological sense that requires shared belief, but in the civic sense that male strength is morally consequential and therefore must be disciplined, directed, and bound to obligation. Strength that exists for others, for family, for community, for the vulnerable, is masculinity worthy of the name. Strength that acts on impulse, however well-intentioned, is something else.
We know what sacred masculinity looks like because we have seen it. At Bondi Beach, Boris Gurman moved toward gunfire and tried to disarm an attacker before the massacre fully unfolded. He was killed. Ahmed al Ahmed physically disarmed another attacker and saved countless lives. Neither man acted for attention. They acted because innocent people were in mortal danger and no one else could stop it. On Oct. 7, Gil Ta’asa threw himself on a grenade to shield his sons; covenantal love enacted in its most radical form.
These men did not confront ambiguous situations. They faced unambiguous evil: mass shooters, terrorists, and grenades. The threat was immediate, the stakes were mortal, and no alternative existed. Their courage was not performance. It was a last resort.
The Pretti case is not comparable. Whatever one concludes about the conduct of federal officers — and those questions deserve rigorous investigation — this was not a mass shooting or a terrorist attack. It was a volatile law-enforcement encounter in which the wisest course of action was far from obvious. Conflating the two debaseses the very concept of protective courage.
The masculinity being celebrated in the Pretti narrative is not the masculinity of the father who provides, the neighbor who shows up, or the citizen who builds. It is the masculinity of the moment: visible, dramatic, and brief. It asks nothing of a man except that he act. It is masculinity as performance, not as formation.
This is where the current debate goes wrong. The choice is not between blind compliance and reckless confrontation. The essence of mature masculinity is operating within constraints — knowing when to speak, when to step back, and when stepping forward makes a situation more dangerous rather than less.
Why, then, is this behavior being sanctified before the investigation has even concluded?
Part of the answer lies in our cultural moment. We are addicted to moral clarity, to narratives that sort cleanly into heroes and villains. Outrage travels faster than prudence. Moral theater photographs better than restraint. A man who steps forward becomes a symbol; a man who steps back is invisible. But invisibility is often what keeps people alive, including the people you are trying to protect.
Tragedy is not evidence of virtue. Dying in a confrontation does not retroactively validate the choice to enter it. The hardest form of courage is not stepping forward, and it is knowing when stepping forward will cost more than it saves.
When we tell young men that courage means physical confrontation with authority, we are not preparing them for lives of service. We are preparing them for moments of destruction, including their own.
MUSEUMS WON’T REBUILD TRUST BY CHOOSING SIDES
None of this requires approving of every law-enforcement tactic. It does not require accepting official accounts at face value. Those are serious debates in a free society. But turning a volatile, unresolved incident into a morality play about masculine virtue obscures rather than clarifies what we should be asking.
Pretti’s death is a tragedy. But tragedy is not a template. Turning it into a masculinity myth does not honor the dead. It endangers the living.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.