Moments after Luigi Mangione was handcuffed at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, a police officer searching his backpack found a loaded gun magazine wrapped in a pair of underwear.
The discovery, recounted in court Monday as Mangione fights to keep evidence out of his New York murder case, convinced police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that he was the man wanted in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan five days earlier.
Denying treatment isn’t murder. Has no one explained to you what murder means?
It’s not that he just denied treatment. He ordered his company to deny treatment FOR COVERED ITEMS according to the insurance plan. This caused people to not get life saving care, die, and no longer be a “burden” on their bottom line. That IS murder. Premeditated.
That’s like seeing someone hanging from a ledge of a cliff because they fell and, instead of helping, they stomped on their fingers so they plunged to their death at the bottom.
The CEO was responsible for more death than his alleged killer by a several tens of thousands fold ratio.
And sadly, despite how horrific it is- at the end of the day, it is legal. He didn’t hunt these people down and end them. He denied them coverage.
This needs to change, but vigilantism clearly isn’t going to do it, and this is evident in the fact that it’s still happening. In fact, I believe it’s even worse now.
But- let’s say we bring the anger to the streets anyway, and full on gun down every CEO that we don’t like. What is stopping us from stopping at CEOs? Why not end regional managers we disagree with? Local managers? What about shift leaders?
Hell… Why even stop at our own places of work? Neighbors? Bad service providers? Anyone is a mark!
Where do we draw the line where murder isn’t okay just because we don’t like what someone does?
There is a reason we have laws in place to stop slippery slopes like this from happening. And we are better than these assholes. They got to do what they do using our system of law- so we will need to use that system of law to stop them.
Murder isn’t the way this is done. This is just how you escalate them putting the military in every city.
I don’t even necessarily disagree, but how do you say the exact name of the fallacy you are invoking without seeing the problem in what you’re saying?
There can be clear start and stop points. Why would this ever lead to regional managers as you describe? Why would it ever lead to people you simply disagree with? To argue in good faith, you need to take the point as it stands, clearly stopping at a level of someone who is “responsible for far more death.” That is the argument that the above commenter posted, and there’s not a good reason to extend that any further.
Now, I’m going to step away from the context of homicide, but this is at a base an incredibly gullible point. Virtually every civil rights movement has been accomplished through breaking laws, called civil disobedience.
“an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.” - MLK
I’ll simplify:
When we start killing people we don’t like, the line gets drawn closer and closer to home.
“Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the ‘slippery slope’: once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die” ~ Peter Singer
“Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.” ~ Leon Lass
In the aftermath of the killings, approval of claims skyrocketed. If CEOs kept getting deleted for their horrifically immoral actions, then I’ve no doubt we’d have a different healthcare system right now. Your bootlicking is exactly what they rely on to literally keep killing people. You are enabling them to kill people.
It’s a trolly car problem. If I’m confronted with this moral dilemma, I’m choosing the lever that kills the CEO to save millions of lives.
In this case, this person was so vile, so directly contributing to the misery of society, the slope aint slippery at all.
The reason is that law enforcement is a tool to protect capital. The police and politicians will never step in for this issue, because they are captured by the capitalist class. Nothing you can do (well…) can change that fact, and they want you to waste your time on performative protests and attempts at legal reform.
If Luigi had killed his health insurance claim worker instead, you’d never even have known his name. You don’t need to remind me that I’m better than CEOs. I’m completely certain of it. Because I don’t make my daily work harvesting money via the suffering of millions of people.
Enters the trolly problem, exits me. I’m done. lol.
Look up depraved heart murder.
It’s a real legal tool used by prosecutors all over the country. The idea is that if someone actively chooses to take actions so incredibly dangerous in pursuit of their own interests that it is likely to cause people to die, that indifference to human life can be treated as malice aforethought (intent to kill) and they can be charged with 2nd degree murder for any deaths resulting from thise actions. The classic example would be knowingly selling tainted food or medicine for profit.
And it’s not just a US law. China literally executed executives for signing off on the sale of tainted baby formula.
Brian Thompson intentionally ordered the increased rejection of pre-authorizations for covered procedures and medications in order to drive up profit, resulting in a great deal of injury and death.
Is random people shooting execs in the street my preferred choice for how society handles these issues? No. But when official justice is denied, the inevitable result is people deciding to act on it themselves.
Johnson is dead because he was shot, yes. But more than that, he’s dead because the justice system refuses to hold people like him accountable for their illegal actions.
You really need to know how it works before you argue it. I get that one of you looked this up one day- and the rest of lemmy all piled on thinking that it’s a one-and-done legal defense after only just reading about it, but…
Proof of INTENT TO KILL means he’d have to know without question that they would have died, and that they had NO OTHER MEANS to acquire the procedure. This is nearly impossible to prove and the entire defense could rest on this notion alone.
For the record, I’m not agreeing with this shit-
I’m simply pointing out why it’s not so fucking simple as it seems. Everyone here seems to think the easiest solution is the best solution without ever questioning why the easiest solution seems so easy, yet no one has tried it.
Hope this helps:
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1337&context=dlj
Fiiiine manslaughter