Is Celebration of UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Assassination a Sickness?

Celebrating someone’s death is usually considered condemnable at least to some degree. When it comes to extra-judicial killings, like assassinations, hailing the crime or the criminal implies a collective social evil – the kind recently observed in America following the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson early this month.

The day after Thompson’s assassination, The Liberty Daily posted a video to its Rumble channel showing what it called a “liberal homosexual” calling the incident “pretty tragic” because the shooter was “able to get only one of them.” He is seen hailing the assassination as “a good start.”

On Friday, December 6, a group of New Yorkers put on some egregious display of celebration of Thompson’s killing by publicly holding a shooter look-a-like contest at the Washington Square Park. The New York Post reported on the story and posted a video of moments from the hateful contest.

Most of the nearly 600 comments on the video expressed condemnation of UnitedHealthcare and Thompson and some even mocked those who would feel any sympathy for him.

The New Republic called the outpouring of anti-Thompson sentiments and cheerful responses on social media to his assassination unsurprising given the “simmering public discontent” over the performance of the health insurance industry.

Fox 11 reported on the cheerful and mocking reactions to Thompson’s assassination in a video report posted to YouTube on December 8, tagging it as “cheering vigilantism.”

National Review called such reactions to the assassination of Thompson “pro-terror sentiment” that embraces assassination as an acceptable means of social change. The article questioned:

“Are we really living in the country we thought we did?”

Though the police have not formally announced the motive of the 26-year-old suspect Luigi Mangione for gunning down Thompson, material evidence recovered at the crime scene suggests that the suspect had issues with the insurance industry, reported Forbes (December 11). The story wrote:

Officers found three 9mm rounds at the scene and bullet casings had the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” on them, which echo a phrase commonly used to criticize tactics insurance companies use to reject claims.

If Mangione indeed killed Thompson out of revenge, the pro-assassination reactions in public and on social media parallel the suspected killer’s motive. Expressions of joy, mockery, and praise for violence come as manifestations of passive aggression that complement the active shooting. In a paper titled “Revenge: An Analysis of Its Psychological Underpinnings” published in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology (2014), Leonie H. Grobbink and fellow researchers wrote that engaging in destructive acts such as homicide is a pathological way of dealing with feelings of revenge. The paper cited earlier research that sees feelings of revenge as a natural channel to express resentment and indignation. Others emphasize working explicitly toward forgiveness.