Always seemed pretty strange to me that you can build and oversee an organization widely perceived (whether fairly or not) as evil, host what those evil-perceivers will view as Bad Rich Guy Conference in public, in a country where anyone can get as many guns as they want, and there isn't more violence like this. Seems like an unstable operating point for a society.
This is the comment that has been in my head since the news broke, and I feel like we are only at the beginning, like the pause before the first drop of a rollercoaster with the forward looking macro (political and economic tension, broadly speaking). Laws and rules only matter so long as we're all willing to believe they do.
Same here. With as many guns and victims of corporate greed that we have, I'm actually pretty shocked that we don't see this happening as routinely as, say, school shootings.
I wonder if we'd see slightly more ethical behavior from corporations if their C-level staff and board members had to routinely practice lock-down drills because they were getting offed once a week.
Doubt it. They will just never leave their island compounds and other fortresses. There have been many news stories lately of these guys building up compounds and bunkers. Many of them off-shore and entirely unreachable by the general public.
Many of these CEO types never interact with the general public without many armed men around them. I would not expect them to act any more ethical than they currently are.
We've all been watching how effective drones have been in the Ukraine war and there's nothing stopping a motivated individual with nothing to lose from droning a corrupt elected official, a cop who brutalizes innocents or an oligarch.
The rich will isolate themselves further behind even more surveillance technology, more physical barriers, and, because that is never enough, inordinate amounts of paid thugs.
I don't know how to write this comment in a way that won't land me in a CIA black site so I'll just start with a disclaimer that this post in no way celebrates or condones any violence, but I wouldn't be surprised if political assassination attempts go up 10-fold in the next 10 years. We already saw two different assassination attempts against Trump during the lead up to the election. You can read my older comments to know my political leanings, I don't like Trump. But wow, I'm genuinely more worried about the stability of our society because of increases in violent acts like this and the inevitable retaliation by the government against all people in the name of "security", than anything Trump could enact.
I wouldn't be surprised if New York passes new gun control laws because of this shooting; I wouldn't be surprised if there's a congresscritter or White House Staffer or judge who's assassinated in the next several years causing some kind of martial law situation. It's scary times we live in right now.
I know you are half-joking, but it shows how worrying things are related to public discourse where you need such a disclaimer at the start of your argument.
The scenario you describe is rather frightening. Let's hope the "CEO class" (for lack of a better term) and the general public will allow reason and ethics to win out.
One thing that is for certain, there should be better legal limits to what companies can get away with. We need our justice system to get involved well before vigilante's start running amok. The US government should have stepped in a full decade ago to reign-in United Healthcare's misconduct and fraud.
New York State and City (separate firearms laws) already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, requiring permits for purchasing pistols within NYC, concealed carry licenses throughout the state, magazine size limits, etc.
>I wouldn't be surprised if New York passes new gun control laws because of this shooting; I wouldn't be surprised if there's a congresscritter or White House Staffer or judge who's assassinated in the next several years causing some kind of martial law situation. It's scary times we live in right now.
This is most likely going to happen with an incoming authoritarian gov't anyway.
Do recall that one Congress critter, that is very pro-gun was shot at a baseball game, survived, and still stood against gun legislation. We'll see if things change if the wind shifts and more rich people (the Congresscritters' owners) are targeted.
Trump is an exceptional case who genuinely is feared to democracy itself as risk. The logic doesn't carry over to most other national politicians, although it absolutely can at various local levels.
Besides politicians, corrupt private leaders are at risk.
I am also not convinced that assassinations will make society less stable. At least in the targeting assassin's mind, it's intended to make society more stable by eliminating corruption.
>Laws and rules only matter so long as we're all willing to believe they do.
And everyone has seen it thrown in our faces for a year or so now what the blatant two-tiered system looks like. On a longer time scale if you want to count the lack of consequences for those behind an attempted coup in 2021 and a recession that harmed millions of lives in 2008.
If the government won't hold people accountable, and people are pushed to their ends, then things like this can happen. As OP stated, thankfully, it doesn't happen as often as one would think given our society. It does take a lot to murder someone else.
I think people skip over this a LOT, but it's the basis for society and was long before we had the means to track down most killers and bring them to any sort of justice. Most people, even when given freedom from consequences and ample opportunities, are not murderers.
Not murderers of others they consider to be “in” their own “group”. But murderers of out group folks seems like it just depends on enough rage and desperation to build up.
>Most people, even when given freedom from consequences and ample opportunities, are not murderers.
I don't necessarily disagree with this completely, but it's also worth noting how easily people seem to go with the status quo, eg criminal gangs, nazism, support of genocides, etc.
I think most people have a bit of killer in them, given the right circumstances.
People do value their lives and liberty and (for all the memes to the contrary) the police are very good at hunting down murderers of high-value targets because most challenges the police face are challenges of focus and resource-allocation and cities tend to authorize a spare-no-expense approach to something perceived as a direct attack on the fundamentals of the status quo. Consider the full-scale house-to-house manhunt after the Boston Marathon bombing as an example case.
So I think most people know that if you come at the king, you are definitely throwing your future away (and Americans, for all the complaining, tend to be comfortable / hopeful enough that they don't want to do that).
Are they? I thought homicides committed outdoors, with a gun, between people of no or distant social connection were basically unsolvable. Even for a rich white victim. Unless this guy dropped his wallet, used an exotic caliber, or is somehow connected to a prior threat, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he is not found.
Apparently he went to Starbucks a few hours before the shooting. They have a surveillance photo of him, but he was wearing a mask. If he was dumb enough to do that, he might have been dumb enough to pay with a credit card. If this isn't the case and he keeps his mouth shut, he'll be awfully hard to find, especially if he doesn't live in NYC. We know he was a white male and that's about it.
Even the Secret Service doesn't have a great track record for preventing attempts. Their presence puts some stress on the perpetrators, which does help, and they are good at preventing quick wide-open follow-ups to a miss or partial success, but they're bad at preventing the first shot or two. And I don't think it's because they're exceptionally bad at what they do, but because if someone really wants to take a shot, entirely stopping them is a hard problem by the time they're already close and armed.
And the secret service has the luxury of being able to shut down whole blocks/towns when they think they need to, that’s not something a random bodyguard of a CEO can do every time the CEO drives around.
Right, there are lots of them and they have more resources and options than a CEO's bodyguards, and still aren't (and again, I don't think this is, at least in general if not in every specific case, exactly their fault) super effective at preventing people from taking a shot, if they really want to and if their plot isn't discovered beforehand.
They do discourage "casual" attempts pretty well, and raising the difficulty constrains and pressures even the dedicated who succeed at striking (if not at achieving their ends) in ways that surely matter, but I think most of that has more to do with the shutting-down-whole-blocks and cordoning-off-entire-areas stuff. The strictly body-guard activity they do mostly just prevents sustained attempts—which isn't nothing, but CEOs aren't gonna keep those first couple bullets at bay with bodyguards. Broader behavior modification? Now that might work.
Indeed. For president's the SS has hundreds of agents and local law enforcement and they position security in the whole area. The pelosi home wacko got through because the one or two SS didn't even notice.
I don't think most Americans perceive health insurance organizations as evil, nor do they condense the fault to a specific person (like the CEO). Maybe the entire system is at fault, but individual greed isn't a major failing, it's virtually expected.
On the internet, all conversations about health care will garner comments mocking the US system, but as a resident it's not like we have a lot of choices.
