The reasoning or motive are almost suspiciously clear: Thompson is was the CEO of a widely despised health insurance company under scrutiny for a lot of shady shit. The shooting happened just before 7 in the morning on a busy street in the biggest and most active city in the nation. Edit to add: In front of the hotel in which the company’s investor meeting was to take place. Left behind at the scene are bullet casings with the words “Delay” “Deny” and “Dispose” written on them which seem to allude to the company’s habit of denying medical care.
It’s so damn obvious that I’m starting to doubt it.
The thing that really gets me is, I can think of several other grievance killings like this; Timothy McVeigh, The Unabomber, a bunch of their ilk, folks who hurt or killed people over sociopolitical grievances. They tended to be terroristical and only managed to swat vaguely in the direction of their enemy; Timothy McVeigh for example bombed a government building killing or injuring hundreds of non-policy making government employees from a number of different agencies, and 19 children in the building’s daycare center. Kaczynski was kind of mad that the modern world had happened and mailed bombs to universities.
Then we have this latest guy, who apparently had a beef with UnitedHealthCare, and dealt with it by assassinating the CEO with a silenced pistol. One rich asshole down, one terse yet loud and clear message delivered to the rest of his ilk, no innocent bystanders hurt.
When’s the last time that happened in the English-speaking world?
One rich asshole down, one terse yet loud and clear message delivered to the rest of his ilk, no innocent bystanders hurt.
This right here is the message the aristocracy doesn’t want you to hear. I can’t count the number of times this guy was referred to as a “mass shooter” in the news.
No. He was not a “mass shooter”. Mass shooters shoot innocent civilians en masse. This guy was an assassin. One target, one goal.
it was never about either of them.
No. He was not a “mass shooter”. Mass shooters shoot innocent civilians en masse. This guy was an assassin. One target, one goal.
While I obviously agree that it can’t be described accurately as a mass shooting, I still wonder:
Do the victims need to be innocent for it to be a mass shooting?
From a philosophical POV there’s a issue of defining what an innocent person is (I mean some Christian societies will say that nobody’s innocent). Is innocence to be judged through the eyes of the shooter or society?
Anyway, that wasn’t the point I set out to make, so let’s set that aside.
Suppose one was to go to a convention of child molesters, war criminals, and nazi death camp guards, and you start shooting indiscriminately. I hope we can agree that members of the categories listed should be classified as “not innocents” by any contemporary standard. Even if only people guilty of the previously mentioned things got hit, wouldn’t it still be a mass shooting once a certain number had been shot?
Fairy tales do not tell children that monsters exist. Children already know that monsters exist. Fairy tales tell children that monsters can be killed.
