Let’s Not Ignore How Brian Thompson Was Murdered
So “a strong person of interest” was taken into custody in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Monday afternoon in connection with the early morning murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He’s a 26-year old Ivy League graduate from Maryland named Luigi Mangione. He did not lose an arm because UHC declined to pay for a revolutionary new Swiss surgical technique. He did not have a daughter who died because her chemotherapy was out of network. So much for all the speculation and all the dark and cruel humor that so lit up social media ever since the crime was committed.
No, Luigi Mangione appears not to have been a victim of our fcked-in-the-head health-care system.
According to the Guardian, he was a free-floating, over-educated intellectual nutball who, among his other quirks, was a big fan of Ted Kaczynski.
While the motive of this shooting is still unknown, early evidence suggests Mangione’s alleged actions could have been a political act. In addition to carrying a gun, a silencer, and other items, Mangione was found to have been in possession of a handwritten, three-page “manifesto” criticizing health insurance companies for putting profits above care, according to senior law enforcement officials.
And, from CNN:
A Goodreads profile that appears to belong to Luigi Mangione shows that earlier this year, Mangione reported having read the 1995 anti-technology manifesto written by the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, the infamous domestic terrorist and mathematician known for sending deadly bombs through the mail between 1978 and 1995.
“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless[ly] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out,” Mangione wrote in a review of the book in January. “He was a violent individual – rightfully imprisoned – who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.”
In his review, he also wrote thoughts someone else had shared about the Unabomber in a Reddit thread online, quoting a commenter who had described Kaczynksi’s acts as “war and revolution,” saying that he “had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere” and that “violence never solved anything” is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”
My own interest remains on the murder weapon. According to the NYPD, Mangione was armed with a so-called “ghost gun,” possibly made on a 3D printer. In October, the Supreme Court heard a case that challenged a Biden administration rule that regulated the sale of kits from which ghost guns can be made. (Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog speculated that the Nine Wise Souls would uphold the regulation, which would be something of an upset.) Of course, among elected Republicans, there was strict adherence to the garbled syntax of Amendment II. From the Washington Examiner:
West Virginia Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey criticized the administration’s approach, stating, “Here again is an example of how the Biden administration uses bureaucratic agencies, this time the ATF, to act as legislators instead of enforcing the laws Congress passed.”… States joining West Virginia in this legal challenge include Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming.
Everybody agrees on opportunity here. Let the pundits argue about motive. I’m still concerned about the means.
