Pun Salad

It’s always the “but” that gets you. There you are, hurtling through the start of the sentence, making all the right points, saying all the necessary things, conveying all that needs to be conveyed, and then, Bam!, out comes that pesky coordinating conjunction that ruins the exercise in an instant. In her revolting statement on the assassination of Brian Thompson, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fell prey to this trap. “Violence is never the answer,” Warren said. “But,” she continued, “people can only be pushed so far.”

Ah.

As one might have augured, Warren’s “but” was the overture to a catastrophic series of statements that, taken together, rendered all that came before them entirely moot. The killing represented “a warning,” Warren suggested,

that if you push people hard enough they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.

There’s a word for this sort of argument in the expansive English language. That word is “justification.”

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders also used Thompson’s murder to opine that the “anger at the healthcare industry tells us is that . . . you cannot have people in the insurance industry rejecting needed healthcare for people while they make billions of dollars in profit.”

As an explanation of Mr. Mangione’s alleged act, this is factually wrong and morally benighted. We don’t know if Mr. Mangione was denied care or even what his specific healthcare complaint was, apart from a general loathing for the system. Perhaps he blames health providers for his back pain, but that isn’t an explanation for murder.

Murder can’t be rationalized, and a society does so at its peril. This is why a healthy society establishes laws and guardrails against killing the innocent that should never be crossed. Shooting a healthcare executive in the back is not a “warning” of anything other than the illness or evil of one young man.

Evoking a collective scream of despair from socialists and anti-corporate types, police in Pennsylvania arrested Luigi Mangione, a suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Thompson, they insist, stood in the way of the sort of health care they think they deserve and shooting him down on the street was some sort of bloody-minded strike for justice.

The assassin's fans—and the legal system has yet to convict anybody for the crime—are moral degenerates. But they're also dreaming, if they think insurance executives like Thompson are all that stands between them and their visions of a single-payer medical system that satisfies every desire. While there is a lot wrong with the main way health care is paid for and delivered in the U.S., what the haters want is probably not achievable, and the means many of them prefer would make things worse.