The left-wing response to the healthcare CEO murder is why I'll never give up my guns

We're getting the message loud and clear

One of the things that gun-supporting conservatives like yours truly regularly get asked is something along these lines: “Why do you need guns?” I am surprised at how many of my fellow gun owners seem really reluctant to give the obvious answer, which is very simply: “To shoot bad people, people who might harm my family or me or other people I care about.” This is easy. Outside of limited sporting functions there is no other reason to own a gun. You can apply that principle to various different defensive scenarios; some of you might own guns because you want to protect against home intruders or other low-level criminals, others might own them because of the critical role that private guns play in discouraging and counteracting tyrannical governments. I say why not both! But the postulate remains the same. It’s for protection, dummies!

I have been reminded of that many times since the execution of the health insurance CEO Brian Thompson earlier this month. Thompson was the chief executive of United Healthcare; his suspected killer, Luigi Mangione, is just a random dude who was apparently driven to literal homicidal madness by the perceived injustice of the U.S. healthcare system and who decided to shoot the man in the back of the head as an act of vengeance or something. I’m not so worried about Luigi Mangione as a type; there are crazy, unwell people everywhere, all the time, and it’s only a very small fraction of them that will be driven to such hideous violence. But I am worried about how people have responded to this murder. People seem to be really into this guy, either that or they seem to be really in favor of the kind of one-off, demented murder he allegedly committed.

That’s not just speculation. Wired noted last week that Mangione is “everywhere,” that his face is on souvenirs and coffee cups and tote bags on Etsy and other merchandise websites. Buzzfeed reports that outwardly pro-murder, pro-Mangione graffiti is appearing on public surfaces and in public displays around the country and the world. An Emerson College poll found that more than 40% of young voters found the murder of Brian Thompson “acceptable.” The New York Post reports that “at least 100” fans showed up to support the accused killer at a Pennsylvania courthouse. A “defense fund” for Mangione has raised more than $150,000 as of Thursday, alleging that the accused murderer is facing “politicized charges.”

It is worth stressing that this does not appear to be a phenomenon limited only to over-idealistic morons or other mentally ill loners. For instance, the left-wing writer Freddie DeBoer responded to the killing with an essay in which he spent more than 3,000 words writing things other than, “It’s wrong to kill health insurance officials because you don’t like the U.S. healthcare system.” That’s a pretty easy thing to write; it can even be a throwaway line in a larger essay about the alleged injustice of our healthcare system, if you’re inclined to write that. But Freddie could not be bothered; he instead sneered at what he described as the “operatic compassion for the murdered CEO”—a husband and father of two, mind you—and suggested that psychiatrists should perhaps be “dragged into the streets” for not taking Medicaid, and outright said that the admitted awfulness of the U.S. healthcare system “makes [him] want to kill someone.” He even considers the query, “Should a lone gunman kill CEOs?” and dismisses it as “not a societally meaningful [question].” Which, I don’t know, it feels pretty societally meaningful since it just happened and a bunch of people are openly supporting it! Freddie is, by all lights, a fairly conventional left-wing thinker; I would wager that this is a pretty normal response for a great many left-wing Americans: The casual indifference toward the public assassination of an innocent person, the apparent inability to feel any sympathy for the brutal execution of a family man, the apparent support for further violence in order to bring about, I don’t know, Medicare-for-all or something…this is legitimately frightening stuff, chiefly because it seems so widespread and popular: Those Emerson poll responses don’t really lie. It’s a lot of people that feel this way!

All of which is to say: Stuff like this always serves as a reminder, if one is ever needed, as to one of the chief reasons that I continue to hold onto my guns. It turns out there are a large number of people around us every day that are pretty much okay with violent, pointless murder as a policy position—not as an act of, or even a precursor to, some kind of sustained and meaningful revolution or political event, but rather just as a matter of, “I don’t like the U.S. healthcare system so it’s fine if I shoot a guy in the back of the head over it.” Maybe you’re comfortable with that kind of thing but I find it extremely alarming—the fact that so many people, many of them probably highly educated, affluent, and with the easy capacity for basic critical thought, are okay with assassinating business leaders over healthcare policy. As a conservative, and someone who is pretty comprehensively and vocally opposed to government healthcare, you can imagine how this makes someone like me feel. It’s the sort of thing that telegraphs the dire need for readily accessible personal self-defense. It’s the sort of thing that says, “You need to have guns because there are a ton of people regularly around you who would be okay with either shooting you in the back of the head or watching someone else do it.”

It’s not crazy to want to stay well-armed and well-protected in an environment like that. It’s some measure of relief that we live in one of the few civilized countries in the world where that right is strongly protected. Thank goodness. Because if I had to live unarmed in a country where nearly half of all up-and-coming voters support shooting guys in the back of the head over healthcare disputes, well, I don’t know about you but I’d feel pretty nervous. I still feel nervous about it, of course. But having firearms as a defensive measure goes some way toward ameliorating those concerns, which is why I keep holding onto mine.