[POINT DE VUE] Murder of Brian Thompson: the killer, a martyr to the system?

On December 4, a man named Luigi Mangione coldly assassinated, in the middle of the street in New York, the president of the very powerful health insurance group UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson. Arrested on the 9th, the individual was recognized by a waiter when he had ordered a hamburger. Stories like these only happen in this permanent B-movie that is American democracy. Mangione, a 26-year-old engineer, was incarcerated and a resolutely aggressive manifesto was found on him, which head-on attacks the American health system, accused of being a huge waste and a money pump, which extorts honest workers and Don’t give them anything in return.

We will remember here that the American social security system, despite Obamacare, is far from being at the same level as ours, and that the vast majority of health spending is based on private insurance, which Luigi Mangione considers to be parasites. On , due to the inadequacy of the health system, the incredible cost of treatments, and, above all, administrative harassment that we, French, know only too well.

UnitedHealthcare abuses

Mangione says that his private health insurance (UnitedHealthcare) has limited specialist consultations to twice a year. That they lost his digital file and asked him to send all the attachments in paper format. That all of this is driving him crazy and that the insurance company has not respected the moral contract that linked it to Luigi Mangione and his mother. He draws a conclusion that seems logical to him: the CEO of the company must die.

The American authorities fear that the young man will appear as a martyr to the system: he quotes extensively, in his statements, the Constitution of the United States. It refers to the main principles of individual freedoms. All this is indisputable. On our side of the Atlantic, Nathalie Artaud, who does not much like large private groups, described the murderer of Brian Thompson as a “vigilante”. Trotskyist DNA never disappoints: one day or another, the smell of blood awakens old instincts.

Should we turn the world into a shooting gallery?

All the same, in this affair, we seem to forget the essential: one man killed another in cold blood. It is an objectively evil act. At the risk of being absurd, we must recall here the very correct decision matrix of the Catholic Church to judge whether an act is good or bad: we first look at the act itself, and only then, intention, then the circumstances. Killing someone is objectively wrong. There is, it seems, a premeditated intention to kill (it is therefore an assassination) and no self-defense. Whatever the praise of defenders of the Second Amendment (” our God-given right to bear arms “) or the narrowest communists – this is indeed a very strange “convergence of struggles” – Luigi Mangione is not a martyr, he is a murderer.

Have you noticed how the coldest monsters are the ones whose naivety has suffered the most? As the most cynical were, once, the most tender hearts? Yes, the world is ugly, people are mean, profit is everywhere and, faced with sprawling and dishonorable organizations, we often feel sad and helpless. If everyone who made this objective observation left their homes with a gun, the streets would be shooting galleries. Let’s not trivialize murders.