>"[local powerful family shoots guns to celebrate, police let them do it because that family runs the region, OP hypothesizes it is a 'cultural thing']" I don'

>"[local powerful family shoots guns to celebrate, police let them do it because that family runs the region, OP hypothesizes it is a 'cultural thing']" I don't know if it's cultural in the sense of "the collective members of our society feel it is customary to have a BBQ on July 4th", but I think even the USA has similar power dynamics. For example, a lot of our cops in the USA can get away with speeding, with being rude, with giving out harsh tickets for relatively harmless offenses. It happens because a certain few individuals control the power centers of American society, and they are unopposed. It's not that Americans have a cultural belief in praising or supporting or tolerating this kind of behavior. It's that 99.99999% of Americans have no power to change it. So, like, in summary: Cultural thing = Middle Easterners like couscous and shawarma and Adnan music. Despotic, autocratic thing = For some reason, world governments allow Saudi princes to kill journalists, and no Saudi or Arab can stop this from happening.