The Shot Heard Round the World
An assailant is being lauded for killing a health insurance executive as payback for a widespread and perceived injustice. What comes next?
Did Luigi Mangione, or someone else, fire the first shot of the next American Revolution?
Some eerie parallels loom.
Many Americans in 1776 were angry, at Britain for imposing taxes and trade restrictions that harmed the colonies’ economy, as well as granting troops unlimited access to colonists’ households. They were angry at British legislators, for passing those laws. They were angry at those and other laws which, they believed, eroded their freedoms. And they had guns.
In 2024, many Americans are angry. They are angry at politicians, at scientists, at educators, and businesses — and especially at health insurers.
“The shooter [of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson] was compared to John Q, the desperate fictional father who takes an entire emergency room hostage after a health insurance company refuses to cover his son’s lifesaving transplant in a 2002 film of the same name,” Princeton University sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci wrote in The New York Times. “Some posted ‘prior authorization needed before thoughts and prayers.’ Others wryly pointed out that the reward for information connected to the murder, $10,000, was less than their annual deductibles. One observer recommended that Thompson be scheduled to see a specialist in a few months, maybe.”
Just one person acting out, a la the fictional John Q, or Walter White of Breaking Bad? Or the real Gavrilo Princip, whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand ignited the First World War?
Political scientists will tell you that revolutions occur when rising expectations are not met, which the Kerner Commission affirmed in its report following the riots that occurred throughout America in 1967. Donald Trump and Republicans in general seized on this widespread feeling, especially held by white males without college degrees. But Americans from all demographics are angry, which helps explain why Trump gained votes from nearly every cohort.
And Americans have guns. About half of households have at least one. When Magione was arrested, police said, according to newspaper reports, he had two in his backpack: a homemade “ghost gun” made on a 3-D printer, and a Glock semiautomatic pistol, which you can buy in any gun store. And in most states, you don’t need a permit to carry one.
Donald Trump was elected on the expectation that he would do something about what many Americans feel angry about: illegal immigration, rampant inflation, and the perceptions of America’s failing pubic education, its declining international superiority, and the disappearance of white people as those in control. When — not if — he fails to make good on all those promises, what might all those people with guns do?
Historians have compared America’s current state to that of the Gilded Age, which coincided with Reconstruction after the Civil War. Recriminations about that policy resulted in social, economic, and political turbulence that persisted into the twentieth century’s second decade. “The partisan combat of that era politicized race, class and religion,” Smithsonian historian Jon Grinspan wrote in 2021, “but often came down to a fundamental debate about behavior. How should Americans participate in their democracy? What was out of bounds? Were fraud, violence and voter suppression the result of bad actors, or were there certain dangerous tendencies inherent in the very idea of self-government? Was reform even possible?”
It was, through government programs that among other accomplishments abolished Jim Crow laws and affirmed civil rights, instituted pension benefits and health care for those retired from the workforce, established campaign finance regulations, and introduced other reforms that helped disarm widespread tensions and distrust. But within the last several decades, many of those have been eroded by judges and state lawmakers. And Trump and his supporters achieved power largely by vowing to take down many more.
Writing in the Times, Tufekci said she doubts those erosions will cease, much less be reversed. Instead, she predicted, “the response to this act of violence and to the widespread rage it has ushered into view will be limited to another round of retreat by the wealthiest.” Cloistering within highly protected gated communities to avoid the next “freedom fighter” with a gun.
There may be more than just one.