A recent video has been making the rounds. It’s of some jerk assaulting a kid wearing a “Make America Great Again.” If you haven’t seen it, take a look.

Now, this assault was fairly mild as assault goes. It’s jerkish behavior and Kino Jimenez, who is the man throwing the soda with the stolen hat in hand, has been fired from his part-time job as a bartender because of it. He was also arrested, thankfully.

Of course, a 30-year-old man who works part-time as a bartender might just have a history of making poor life choices. Just a hunch.

However, let’s take a quick look at what this incident represents.

Jimenez’s actions come just days after Maxine Waters extolled her followers to harass Trump administration officials. This is a similar behavior ramped up slightly because Jimenez was facing some good kids who didn’t want a confrontation.

However, what happens when that behavior gets ramped up? What form will that take? Who will it be against?

Jimenez targeted these kids because of the hat. This wasn’t careful targeting, necessarily, because he was outnumbered and potentially in a bad spot since he knew nothing about these kids. He reacted purely on emotion, on hatred.

What will the next person reacting on hatred toward their ideological opponents do? Throw a rock? Try to use a rock to bash someone’s brains in? Seriously, what form will it take?

This is violence. It’s violence in support of a political ideology. It’s violence toward people who don’t share that ideology.

Yes, this is yet another reason why I own guns.

Right now, the weapons are words and sodas. Thankfully.

We don’t know what the weapons of tomorrow will be. What I do think is reasonable is to assume that there will be an escalation of some kind. If we’re lucky, it’ll just be harsher words and such, but I don’t think we can afford to assume that to be the case.

When you think of your opponents as evil, you can justify all sorts of things. I’m sure Jimenez walked out of that burger place and thought he was the righteous one. I suspect he was really shocked when he was arrested. After all, in his mind, I doubt those kids even registered as people. In his mind, they were less than human.

The problem is when you think of people that way it becomes easy to attack them. It becomes easy to justify all sorts of atrocities. To the Nazis, for example, Jews weren’t people.

Another reason why I own guns is that there are people in this country who have no problem using violence to express their political ideology. They will want to hurt me and mine because I refuse to share their thinking. They want me dead because I’m not part of their tribe, despite me not wishing them anything iller than disappointment come election time.

I won’t draw a gun on a drink being thrown in my face necessarily, but it’s not as far a trip from a drink to a rock as many might like to think, and if it gets to that point, well…

Let’s just say I have a family to take care of and I’ll do what I have to to make sure I’m around to do so.