The UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting
Even if you believe Thompson was all the evil things so many people online say he was — a corrupt corporate CEO guilty of insider trading and working as the face of a company that denies life-saving coverage to tens of thousands of Americans a year in the name of profit — he was a corporate cog. He was responsible to a board and to shareholders. And, in short order, he'll be replaced by another CEO. Nothing will change, except that killing someone in the middle of Manhattan whom you deem evil could now become more normal.
I know how a lot of people might react to me writing this, because I've already encountered the refrains. "It's good these people are scared," is one common throughline of the response. In other words: "No, I don't necessarily support killing corporate CEOs in cold blood on the streets, but if CEOs scale back their predatory behavior because they’re scared of reprisal, that’s a net good.” Or, of course, people might react by saying that I am more worried about the killing of one CEO than a system that kills tens or hundreds of thousands of people a year.
I suppose there's something appealing about these kinds of arguments. They are not entirely unlike arguments I've made in the past — like that we should be prosecuting more corrupt presidents and members of Congress, not fewer, stability of the system be damned. The obvious difference, though, is that when I made those arguments they came from a place of demanding accountability — insisting that the system do a better job of rooting out corruption and evil, not cheering extrajudicial violence on the streets.
To put it differently: If you are hoping for our rich corporate overlords to live in fear of expedited, unanswerable and unexpected punishment, then you are necessarily hoping for us common folk to start delivering that punishment. Which requires us to be the arbiters of who is good and who is evil. The left might consider how long it'll be until abortion-providing doctors or trans activists or Democratic politicians start regularly being mowed down in the street in the name of striking fear into evildoers. If that's the world you want to live in, I strongly suggest signing off the internet and going to spend some time outside.