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Episode: Luigi Mangione and America's pent up pain

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:17:49

Episode Shownotes

Even before Luigi Mangione was arrested for killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the reaction to the shooter was far different than other instances of gun violence.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Full Transcript

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00:04:18 Speaker_11
All right, so first I got to set the scene a little bit.

00:04:20 Speaker_08
So it's been over a week since a masked gunman shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, outside a Manhattan hotel.

00:04:33 Speaker_08
This week, authorities identified and detained an alleged gunman, and he's being charged with murder. You've probably heard his name by now, Luigi Mangione.

00:04:43 Speaker_08
And we kind of have to walk a very delicate line here because we're talking about, you know, violence here, a brazen murder. which is pretty scary to think about for a lot of people.

00:04:52 Speaker_08
And at the same time, there's been a lot of praise and solidarity for this alleged gunman and his actions. The alleged shooter even got his own superhero-esque nickname, with some people on the internet calling him The Adjuster.

00:05:08 Speaker_08
And on the other end, there are reports of CEOs across industries being scared for their lives, beefing up their security details, removing their identities from their company's websites.

00:05:19 Speaker_08
All right, Abone, as somebody who covers gun violence, how would you characterize the reactions we've been seeing to the shooting? And how have these reactions been different from the normal reactions to violence? You know, it is violence.

00:05:33 Speaker_11
hitting somebody who a lot of people feel like typifies the inequalities that lead to other forms of violence. You know what I'm saying?

00:05:46 Speaker_08
Obviously, we are not condoning murder. And this is an awful tragedy for his family. But the response is, it reminds me a little bit of the way when you read about, like, Bonnie and Clyde, right?

00:06:00 Speaker_08
They were doing these really horrible things where they were killing people, they were robbing banks, but this is also during the Great Depression. And people are very, very angry at bankers, right?

00:06:08 Speaker_08
You know, banks have basically tanked the economy and, you know, people have lost their lobby hoods, they lost their homes.

00:06:14 Speaker_08
And so because they were robbing banks, it was seen as a sort of, even though what they were doing wasn't sort of vigilantism, right? It wasn't sort of resolving any of the situations that people found themselves in.

00:06:25 Speaker_08
they were also going after or hitting the pockets of people that were really, really unpopular. And this feels kind of like that kind of folk hero thing.

00:06:33 Speaker_11
I think the Bonnie and Clyde thing is quite accurate. Yes, this was a very public and hard to watch, traumatizing act of violence that will impact his family for years to come. And also, what does he represent? What's the backdrop, right?

00:06:50 Speaker_08
Yeah, I mean, it's something that we don't really think about as violence.

00:06:56 Speaker_08
But just last year, the American Medical Association reported that a third of the physicians they surveyed, and they asked 1,000 physicians, a third of them said that they'd seen delay or denial of care due to prior authorization lead to either serious adverse health effects for their patients or even death.

00:07:15 Speaker_08
Why do you think people have a harder time seeing what happens to people like us on the business end of insurance companies' decisions as violence, but we can see gun violence more clearly as the destructive thing that it is?

00:07:28 Speaker_11
Yeah, you know, it is violence, right? To me, by definition of what harm and violence is, I would absolutely put it in that category. But I think in the U.S., we have such a narrow framework of whose victimization deserves to be remediated.

00:07:47 Speaker_11
I hear it all the time when I write about shootings that happen, you know, in our hoods across America. Someone can straight up be shot and killed a young 22 year old. And it's like, well, that's no victim.

00:07:57 Speaker_11
Is that violence or is that someone getting, you know, all these like flippant comments that now are kind of directed at this CEO.

00:08:10 Speaker_11
I've seen befall people with no power, very little money, honestly, whose communities have been scarred by the extractive nature of industries like healthcare.

00:08:18 Speaker_11
It's violent, but obviously, Brian Thompson is not a young Black boy on the corner who's unfortunately gunned down, but to see his victimhood also questioned in this way is, um, it's been interesting to watch.

00:08:39 Speaker_08
We should also know here that we do know, at least the police said, that the bullets he used had inscribed on them the words, deny, defend, and depose.

00:08:48 Speaker_08
And that echoes a phrase commonly used to describe the alleged tactics that insurers use to avoid paying out insurance claims to their customers. And UnitedHealthcare, we should say, is the biggest health insurance company in the country.

00:09:01 Speaker_08
And it was just slammed last month in a Senate investigation for denying people certain types of care as a way to boost the company's profits.

00:09:09 Speaker_08
Like honestly, when I first heard the news, I thought about when my wife and I were going through our long, arduous IVF journey, not long after we conceived and had our son, I'm so thankful for, one of the big clinics in our area informed its patients that our health insurance was dropping coverage for that clinic.

00:09:39 Speaker_08
And so that didn't impact me and my wife directly, but we just could not stop thinking about all the other folks that we would see in the waiting room, the people who were in the middle of treatment, and suddenly they were going to have to pay out of pocket if they could to try to start a family.

00:09:45 Speaker_08
And it's just very financially and emotionally devastating news that must have been to them, because these are choices about their lives that are out of their hands.

00:09:55 Speaker_08
And it all kind of happened on a dime through the decisions of some healthcare executive or somebody with an actuarial table somewhere.

00:10:02 Speaker_11
Then when you see documents that show how sometimes arbitrary these decisions are, people's lives are being played with, you know what I'm saying? So that a spreadsheet is balanced. And that's a recipe for resentment.

00:10:17 Speaker_11
One thing that is usually a component of why someone shoots someone else is around grievance, right? You have done me wrong. And it sounds like, and obviously we don't know, like, Luigi is innocent till proven guilty. He hasn't made any statements. It's unclear what his motivations are.

00:10:34 Speaker_11
But based on the context and the information that we have now, it appears that a part of the thinking was like, you have hurt all these people. Sending this signal is worthwhile.

00:10:51 Speaker_08
Like, you know, I was reading something that said that the majority of Americans are satisfied with their health care, but the majority of Americans also say that they've had problems accessing that health care.

00:11:01 Speaker_08
And then, of course, the people who report being in poorer health, majority of those people, unsurprisingly, overwhelming numbers of them, of poor people who report being in poorer health, say that they're unhappy with their health care.

00:11:11 Speaker_08
So even the people who like their health care are frustrated by it, right?

00:11:15 Speaker_11
When you're talking about it, it sounds like how people at the airport are like, this sucks, but you know, it's the airport. It should not be that way when you need to go down to get your pap smear and your colonoscopy.

00:11:27 Speaker_11
Just because we have become used to terrible service in this particular department does not mean things are going okay. I think that just having coverage period has so many Americans just like, oh, okay.

00:11:42 Speaker_08
I don't got nothing else to complain about, you know what I'm saying? I got my coverage card. And that's a shame. That's a shame, Gene. But it's also not being acknowledged. Absolutely. I mean, on that point, right, I've seen a lot of people criticizing how the media has been covering this, like how the public is riding with this alleged shooter, and the media hasn't been able to capture that sentiment.

00:12:04 Speaker_08
How do you think the reactions of the public differ from what you've seen, from the way you've seen this covered?

00:12:11 Speaker_11
You know, when I knew that I'd be coming on to talk about this topic, I started paying more attention to cable news. And I saw people straight up, like, scold, right, and say,

00:12:23 Speaker_11
oh, and there's this like disgusting perversion and people loving it and like having that become a part of the story feels incredibly tone deaf, right? And I'm also concerned that mainstream

00:12:39 Speaker_11
national news is putting the same sort of burden of badness, if you will, on people getting their jokes off on the internet, on people who are saying, who are telling their stories, right, of these horrific outcomes because of shoddy healthcare coverage, they're putting those on the same level as folks who have actually contributed to that harm, right?

00:13:04 Speaker_11
Like, you can't say that you're just as bad as the billionaire who is, you know, buying up these homes and selling them at exorbitant rates. You're just as bad as that person because you got a joke off about Brian Thompson. That's just not true. We can't equate those.

00:13:18 Speaker_11
And I think that Doing so will only lead to more alienation and lead people to double down. You know what I'm saying? It's dangerous.

00:13:31 Speaker_08
It was really interesting to see Ben Shapiro, you know, famed right-wing pundit, sort of lamenting the air quotes, the left's response to the shooting and taking glee. His audience clapped back at him really pretty hard. It was like, nah, this is not a left thing.

00:13:43 Speaker_08
We are very angry at these people too.

00:13:47 Speaker_08
Like we don't have tears to shed for these people as well, which was really interesting to watch them have to metabolize the fact that this wasn't like partisan schadenfreude. This was like a thing that is felt broadly across ideological categories.

00:14:01 Speaker_11
The polarization you mentioned, whenever there is a high-profile kind of vigilante-style shooting, it's usually pretty evenly split along party lines, right?

00:14:10 Speaker_11
You think of Trayvon Martin, of Ahmaud Arbery, you know, so many folks who were shot by usually a white or white-adjacent person who said, I'm taking the law into my own hand.

00:14:22 Speaker_11
Usually you can rely on how people are going to feel about that, on who they voted for in their politics. And I think they were going to see the alleged shooter as this sort of like Antifa figure who their base would reject.

00:14:38 Speaker_11
But their base, I'm sure, was among the Americans who were like, yeah, I got health care, but it don't work for me.

00:14:51 Speaker_11
And that has just thrown people into a warp that is really interesting to watch, but I worry won't end in root cause solutions, as most mass shootings don't.

00:14:58 Speaker_08
I keep thinking about when we cover police violence on Code Switch, one of the things we always have to remind people is that these individual cases, they often unearth all this feeling.

00:15:09 Speaker_08
Anger that people have over historical racism, it all comes to bear on these individual cases. But there's no way the actual resolution of these cases in an American court. is going to resolve all those issues, right?

00:15:21 Speaker_08
And so I imagine that the trial for Luigi Mangione is going to be really, really heavily covered, right? Maybe even like OJ levels of coverage, right?

00:15:31 Speaker_08
But then what's going to happen is that people are going to like think of the verdict as reckoning with all this other stuff that this case is unearthed. And it can't do that. The verdict is only about this case. It's only about who shot whom, who was where.

00:15:40 Speaker_08
I wonder what that means for how we do or don't resolve all that other stuff.

00:15:47 Speaker_11
This is something I have been thinking about, right? Like this really high-profile incident of gun violence, what is it going to change?

00:15:57 Speaker_11
I worry that much like other high-profile shootings, especially high-profile mass shootings, where someone does it for these grievance reasons, I don't think that those will ever truly get addressed with this.

00:16:13 Speaker_11
And I'm just really worried that we're going to lose the plot, which is that millions of people, even if they do have insurance, don't have actual access to health care in a timely, sustainable, affordable manner.

00:16:28 Speaker_11
And the fact that that continues to get lost is extremely worrying and makes the ground really fertile for someone else to try it, you know?

00:16:41 Speaker_08
So I guess to close out, I'm wondering, like, at the end of the day, this is still the killing of a man whose murder, as we said, is like standing in for all these other things, right? This rage that so many people feel towards this larger system.

00:16:56 Speaker_08
I'm wondering, what do you think are the wrong lessons that we could take away from this moment?

00:17:02 Speaker_11
One of the negative things we can get out of this is just seeing more and more people be OK with folks settling their grievances with guns. We see arguments that start in bars that end in shootings.

00:17:16 Speaker_11
We see conflict in homes that end up with entire families dead straight up. And I understand where the jokes are coming from. And, you know, a couple have elicited a little like, oh, they kind of ate it with that one. I don't

00:17:27 Speaker_11
want the lesson that people take from this to be like, oh, well, I could just, oh my gosh, I'll shoot somebody too. And then my message will get out, right?

00:17:38 Speaker_11
Because we've seen that sentiment lead to some of the most devastating high-profile mass shootings in our nation's history. Because someone said, I got a grievance, y'all got me messed up, and I got this gun, watch what's going to happen.

00:17:54 Speaker_08
Abadie, you are incredible. I've learned so much here. Thank you so much for coming and trying to think about this and trying to make sense of this very banana story. And obviously, the story is far from over.

00:18:05 Speaker_08
I mean, this trial is going to be an obsession. So thank you for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. It was a great discussion.

00:18:10 Speaker_11
That was Abadie Clayton.

00:18:13 Speaker_08
She covers gun violence for The Guardian.

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