UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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.
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.
It's just a matter of time before this happens.
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 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.
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.
They won't. They're making billions out of others suffering.
>general public will allow reason and ethics to win out
"Ethics". It's a trolley problem... if a person through their actions enables many people to die, is it wrong to kill them?
To paraphrase Chris Rock... I ain't saying he should have killed him... But I understand.
The term you are looking for is "oligarchs"
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.
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.
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.
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.
And who feels represented by their government these days?
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-assassin-showed-just-h...
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.
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).
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.
I guess suspects will be a list of people who have been paying into United Health Care insurance who thought they were covered, but got turned down, possibly for a terminal illness, for greater profits.
> select * from subscribers
https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-i...
edit: We do not know the shooters motivations, nor do I presume to know. But wanted to add a link for context to the above comment to show context for the statement.
I think it's a really good open question as to why more unhinged Americans do school shootings than healthcare insurance executive shootings.
I'd love to read a sociology paper on it.
When you have an event like this, with the overwhelmingly positive reception by regular people, and within 24 hours BCBS rolls back a plan that has been years in the making to limit anesthesia during surgery, it shows two things:
1) murdering people who themselves murder people is not really socially unacceptable
2) direct action works in ways that the system does not
Maybe that changes the status quo a little, who knows?
So why is wealth concentration bad for society apart from that? Because the ultimate form of wealth distribution is war and revolution. It's way the descendants of Rockefeller, the Medicis or Caesar don't own the world. Society eventually snaps and a lot of violence ensues. Eventually you end up with the French Revolution and heads end up on pikes or separated by guillotines.
One of the messages of Fight Club is that the rich and powerful cannot insulate themselves from the people they are oppressing. Your gardener, your driver, your chef, your security guard. Any of them is capable of taking matters into their hands and they will only be pushed so far.
You saw this play out in Japan with the reaction to Shinzo Abe's assassination a couple of years ago. While world leaders were outraged, the Japanese kinda got it. You can dig deep into this with the Unification Church, its influence on Japanese politics and, if you really want, how the Unification Church is tied to the CIA.
United Healthcare is quite literally killing people for profit. Just like the Sacklers and so many others. We've become completely desensitized to this. Private health insurance is completely inefficient (look at how much the US pays per-capita for health care vs any other developed nation and then compare our coverage). We could literally save millions of lives and cut costs by getting rid of these lecherous middlemen.
So I don't condone or justify violence like this. It's simply analysis to see that this kind of thing is going to continue to happen as material conditions worsen and wealth inequality rises. In his ~3 year tenure are United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson quite literally killed thousands of people yet there's so little outrage over that.
all potential suspects that can wrap the world, and more.
UNH CEO reaped what he sowed. To be honest, this is unlikely to do anything in the long term. In the short term, dip in UNH stonk, but recover over next quarter.
Next cookie cutter CEO to be installed will just continue the same shit. Will probably demand 24/7 security paid for by company. Costs subsequently passed down to the unfortunate people that have to pay for their dogshit insurance policies.
He probably already had a security detail (obviously not good). For someone at his level, his bespoke life/whatever insurance most likely requires it.
Maybe, but what lays outside their door will always haunt them. There’s no replacement that won’t have this in the back of their mind, and I suspect this is sort of the point.
From the killer’s perspective, this was probably the best case outcome.
The worst case? The decision makers of these companies fear every day. And you know what? Everyone thinks twice when they recognize danger.
Because we don't have another option. Your job dictates your insurance, not you, and most jobs explicitly search for insurance companies that don't end up costing them much (but cover enough that people still think they have coverage, maybe).
There's stories going around right now about how BlueCrossBlueShield is going to be dictating the amount of time during a surgery that anesthesia will be covered. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=blue+cross+blue+shield+anes...
Of course, these stories are happening after individuals have made their elections for insurance AND after the companies that would be choosing the various insurance companies to pick from would have already selected their projected insurance provider.
This is answering the question with a very narrow focus on what any one person can do. Sure, when I filled out my job's open enrollment last month, there was no checkbox labeled "Evil Corporation Insurer (y/n)", but there's no inviolable law of nature that requires the US to be this way.
I wonder how people would respond to a survey that asked: "Would you support policies that aim to increase foreign drug imports to bring down pharmaceutical prices?" and a follow-up: "If yes, what about lumber, steel, etc?" My guess is that many would say yes to question 1, but not apply the same logic to other goods.
For this trade deficit question the important context is that some trade partners artificially devalue their currency (relative to the USD) to maintain strong export advantage (which therefore directly disadvantages their own people, since their wages are worth less on the global market, ie. when they are importing they have to pay more, when they are going on a vacation abroad they have to pay more, and this is a large chunk of the "missing trade" (the trade deficit), which translates to missing demand for US exporting sectors.
The other important piece of the puzzle is that US residents are also negatively affected by one distinct factor, which is the resource curse of the dollar's reserve currency status. Because due to the exorbitant privilege[1] (of the USD being the de facto global reserve currency) the financial sector is at an advantage compared to other sectors, and it slowly crowds out other economic activity.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
[2] https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-class-politics-...
What there _is_, is too much pain and too many spoons that each and every person needs to manage every day, and most (nearly all) people are unable/unwilling to let even more important things drop.
We also have crab mentality in the US, where if one person hopes for, or even gets, something better, they're pulled back down.
And we have an efficient, powerful propaganda machine that tricks people into voting against specific areas of their interests - see "I love ACA, but I hate Obamacare" commentary.
The work to fix this is terrifyingly hard and *huge* and the people that will choose to fight and improve the situation will be making absolutely enormous sacrifices to do it.
To be fair, ACA passed, and here we are. Healthcare companies are making more than they ever did. Have you considered that powerful propaganda machine works both ways?
https://www.axios.com/2024/08/08/insurer-profits-health-care...
The historical reason for why it's tied to specific jobs is because salaries couldn't raise for a period of time in US history and so jobs started offering other perks, like paying for all or most of your health insurance.
Now, companies get group discounts and still (often) pay meaningful percentages of many employees healthcare, and so getting private insurance is a nonstarter.
It was less concentrated industry before the ACA.
the fundamental reason is as usual: too much government regulation that was erected with good intentions, but ended up becoming a competitive Moat that reduced the competition and entrenched big players. With that amount of regulation healthcare should be universal like in Canada or UK.
To maintain private healthcare sector, there should be less government
While I agree with this, that regulations are often championed and even written by entrenched companies to increase the barrier to entry, the government can sue to block any merger they deem a harm to competition. Unfortunately they choose not to.
AI is a good example of this. If the government regulated AI, the only companies who will control and profit from AI are the ones who already have it.
As someone that's lived on the Canadian border for the past 20 years, I frankly think we need more regulations. Drug prices in the US are so absurdly high that most terminally sick Americans will happily drive back and forth to Windsor if it means treatment they can afford. It's a testament to America's core dysfunction, something that Canada can somehow get right on their first try but America... well, we struggled to put Shkreli behind bars.
In Russia, things are different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_deaths_of_notable_R...
And the middle class thinks it's the poor taking handouts why they're not richer.
When it's the actual billionaires behind all of it.
You may question his methods, but you can't question his effectiveness.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-piece-unitedhealthcare-ceo-...
Automatic and semi-automatic weapons work the way the do because force of the round (recoil) pushes back the bolt carrier, which a spring will then push forward again. Shot is fired, bolt carrier goes back, spring pushes it forward.
Subsonic ammunition have less charge than regular ammunition, to reduce the velocity. This also means less recoil. Combined with the spring now being too stiff, the bolt carrier will simply not move back far enough to successfully chamber a new round. So you have to manually chamber a new round between each shot. One solution is to use a light / less stiff spring that is adjusted to the force of the subsonic ammo.
Same principle for when shooting blanks.
https://nypost.com/2024/12/04/us-news/video-shows-gunman-exe...
“ UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) will host its annual Investor Conference for analysts and institutional investors in New York City on Wednesday, December 4, 2024, beginning at 8:00 a.m. EST.” [1]
[1] https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/newsroom/2024/2024-11-26-u...
https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate...
Get stuck with massive crippling bills? Sure. Can't afford insulin? Likely. But if you are at the hospital and your coverage is denied, legally that's the hospital's problem.
Last time my kid was in the hospital, the hospital didn't bill my insurance for 18 months on some items!
[1] https://www.valuepenguin.com/health-insurance-claim-denials-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/business/dealbook/unitedh...
> Get seniors on your plan
> Deny them care to save costs
> Bill the US government for nonexistent care anyway
> ???
> Profit
> A gunman, who investigators tell CNN was waiting for some time before Thompson’s arrival, opened fire from 20 feet away firing multiple times, striking Thompson.
This from CNN makes it sound like it could possibly be targeted, though there are very few details at this time and sometimes these things are misreported in the immediate aftermath.
I'm nervous about the precedent this sets, if that turns out to be the motive.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was thousands or tens of thousands.
One can dream.
Undergoing treatment and having to deal with insurance can put people in a dark place. Even if it's just an accidental injury putting you in medical debt, it can feel like the end of your life.
I'll never forget getting denied neulasta while on my last round of chemo and having to pay $21,000 out of pocket until we argued it with insurance. I wouldn't go as far as murder, but I can only imagine others would.
Beyond the one motive we can think of, this person (like any person) had other things going on in their life. We have no idea what the motive was until the killer is found.
We don't even know that the killer got the right person.
The rest I agree with but this part we know, right? CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are not randomly gunned down... It 100% could have been anyone that committed this crime but they 100% got the right person...
Why not? I don't think random chance really cares about a person's occupation, it's just more unlikely because there are fewer of them.
I know multiple people (and have myself experienced this) who've been greeted with warnings and concern from relatives when traveling to major cities... when those cities have violent crime rates far lower than the places they/we live. Like, a fifth as much or lower. It's still "common knowledge" that e.g. Manhattan is way more dangerous than a "safe" red state suburban/exurban county (LOL, very not necessarily true) and that the largest cities must be way more dangerous than small and mid-sized cities (also very not necessarily true).
Especially post-9/11 up until COVID it was practically Disneyland. You had little chance of being a victim of random crime in the vast majority of city neighborhoods or on the subway. That's certainly not true anymore. (Caveat: In 2009 I was drive-by shot at on gang initiation night on 96th St & Columbus Ave in Manhattan. Yes, it happened, but place and time are important factors.)
Also we've seen a return of large storefront vacancy numbers in Manhattan.
Where I live now people truly do not lock their doors. Most garage doors in my neighborhood stay open 24/7.
> Where I live now people truly do not lock their doors. Most garage doors in my neighborhood stay open 24/7.
Rich suburban and small towns—and I mean where the whole area's kinda rich, not just a few neighborhoods—are in fact the sort of safe that lots of people incorrectly assume all suburbs and small towns are. I know how it is, I (now) live in one of those too, so Manhattan is in-fact more dangerous than where I am (these days). :-)
Like, my kid's neurologist lives just up our street and there's a country club every half mile, it seems like. Yeah, this particular place is quite safe. Go figure, if there's vanishingly little poverty around there's also very little violent crime. But lots of US suburbs, rural towns, small suburban towns, and smaller cities are really, really poor and there doesn't (any more? Maybe ever?) seem to be some kind of aw-shucks folksiness of attitude that effectively counters the effects of that—they're just as crime-ridden and dangerous as you'd expect, from the poverty stats.
There's a trailer park 2 minutes down the road and lots of small family farms here.
Also the thing is the vast majority of the crime here is targeted. It's violence between gangs/drug dealers. It will never have anything to do with me.
But in NY and Chicago (especially Chicago) I know lots of average, unaffiliated people who have been robbed at gunpoint. Also large amounts of crime in NY goes unreported because people mind their business and/or don't trust the cops. They literally have had a "if you see something, say something" campaign for most of my life for this reason.
I've literally seen people step over people who were bleeding out from stab wounds in the NYC subway. I witnessed multiple violent crimes while living in NYC.
Yes, crime stats are a mess for a bunch of reasons. The most-reliable are murder stats, because they rarely go unreported or otherwise unnoticed, and are the hardest to "juke the stats" on, especially if you try to do it for more than a brief span of time. Those are better in scary ol' Manhattan than in much of "safe" small town, small city, and suburban America, and often way better.
[EDIT] Assessing risk based on course crime stats, I mean. Of course individual context and situations matter a lot, too.
Getting murdered on my front lawn is a lot different than getting murdered in the lobby of a housing complex with 1000 people living in it.
Density is even more important when considering random crime because you have even more people who will be potential victims when someone is targeting an area.
This is true—it's why rural towns and small cities are often really dangerous, while the overall state they're in might not have high violent crime stats, if a large proportion of the state's population isn't in towns or cities at all. Living far away from people is an effective way to avoid crime.
1: https://www.police1.com/ambush/articles/10-us-counties-with-...
The rhetorical trick here is the cut-off point. For one thing, you're limiting it to cities in the first place. For another, take a look to see where their cut-off for size of city under consideration is—the higher it is, the more it'll skew toward big names (duh) so they almost always set it pretty high, and the lower you make the cut-off, the farther (most) of those plummet down and off the list as small and mid-sized cities take over.
Sure, the deep south and west sides might be not be too nice (particularly at night), but that's mostly gangs shooting at each other. My neighborhood is actually quite nice, but even if you take the city as a whole, the violent crime rate is 639.7 per 100,000 people [0] or 5.38 per 1,000 [1], depending on what source you go by (but I'll just use the 639.7 figure since that actually makes the city look worse). Compare this to Houston, TX: 11.35 per 1,000 people [2], Dallas, TX: 7.71 per 1,000 [3], or Nashville, TN: 10.95 per 1,000 [4].
So, 0.006397 (Chicago) vs 0.01135 (Houston) vs 0.00771 (Dallas) vs 0.01095 (Nashville). Hmmm...seems like Chicago is slightly more peaceful than Dallas, I'm 1.77x more likely to be the victim of a violent crime in Houston, and 1.71x more likely in Nashville. One has to wonder, if Chicago is apparently a warzone, why [certain] media outlets aren't equating Houston and Nashville to Fallujah.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago
[1]: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/il/chicago/crime
[2]: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tx/houston/crime
Literally no.
Where I grew up was below median household income and remains that way today (most of it by a good amount) and was by every literal metric safe.
A whole shitload of them have much higher murder rates than NYC and several other "bad" big cities, though, and it's just about never the rich places of that sort that are high-crime (go figure). Yet, for folks who live in those demonstrably-dangerous places and travel, local members of their family commonly freak out about their visiting big cities that are, statistically, a lot safer than the place they're leaving to make the visit. This is due to wild misperceptions of where the dangerous parts of the US are—some are in big cities, but a lot aren't, and many of the "bad" big cities are actually relatively safe, if you compare them to smaller cities and towns.
What I meant is that if you want to look at small towns and suburbs and consistently find ones that are safe, you're going to want to limit your search to the relatively rich ones. That's a category that largely does fit the assumptions of safety that people have for small towns and suburbs in general (which assumption holds... less well, with a wider net cast)
Big cities will naturally have more crime than little villages, but as someone else mentioned, per capita stats are key.
Nonetheless, always the tedious ritual of warnings and concern when I traveled to any "real" city. Like, guys, save that shit for when I'm coming back. I should be warning you, I'm leaving danger. And please stop watching cable news and listening to AM radio.
The actual protest was about ten people laying on the ground in front of the police station in silence. There were a couple cops standing in front of the building, presumably slightly less bored than doing paperwork at their desk. Most people in my city didn't even know it happened.
It's insane the reality they live in. These people will see https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.... and chuckle and say how bad the "mainstream media" is and then go back to watching Fox News scream about how a liberal city is on fire with protests despite NOTHING HAPPENING. I can't understand the willful, intentional ignorance that leads people to believe watching an hour of Fox News makes them knowledgeable about a city of a million people.
https://bsky.app/profile/justinbaragona.bsky.social/post/3lc...
Bob Lee was stabbed.
Ideal outcome: Meaningful steps to address the healthcare crisis.
Less ideal outcome: Parents whose children were denied coverage are put on a watchlist as potential terror suspects.
If you feel that you have nothing to lose, nothing will stop you from doing such things. What is fear of prison for someone who just lost a loved one to what they feel is a heartless bureaucracy lead by this guy?
No paywall, same amount of detail (little) - looked around but not much detail generally in any of the outlets except there was an investor day, he was leaving a hotel, shot in the chest, deceased.
What’s uniquely American about killing decision makers? Especially morally questionable individuals? Yeah, it’s a garbage way for society to operate but this is an expression of the human condition.
If anything this is a level of action I wouldn’t expect from America.
When you think of the awful stress that CEOs put on people like
https://www.reddit.com/r/SEARS/comments/18uwjvg/have_you_int...
and think it's a wonder this doesn't happen more often but then I found out that Lampert had been kidnapped.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/12/2/intel-ceo-pat-ge...
Personally I do not care how much they get paid as much as I care how miserable they can make my life as a customer/vendor/employee.
If I were approaching this professionally I'd be waiting near the check-in desk or elevators.
The ebike was used to get into central park to somewhere without cameras and change clothing etc.
The video is somewhat consistent with a how a professional might appear, calm with reload/jam, back to camera then flee down alley.
That puts it well beyond the reach of the vast majority of NYC residents.
You can't carry in like 90% of Manhattan even with the permit. Even carrying in your own apartment is prohibited without an additional permit.
It's no different than how states used "Poll Taxes" and "Tests" to circumvent the 15th Amendment before the Civil Rights Movement. NYC thinks they are above the law and does everything they can to circumvent it.
Handguns have to be transferred across state lines to a FFL in the state where the transferee resides.
The way straw purchases work for handguns is mostly that a family member who can legally purchase the firearm does.
But if you are talking cross state border sales, which are not the majority even though it’s an oft quoted trope, a resident of Indiana buys a lot of guns, then sells them illegally in Illinois. Precisely because you can’t easily buy a handgun in a state you don’t reside in.
The only private sales that happen are among criminals and within families. Regular people aren't going to risk the kind of charges that stem from misuse after a private sale. Certainly nobody with a legitimate business and livelihood to protect.
https://www.fdle.state.fl.us/FPP/FAQs2.aspx ("Florida does not require a permit to purchase a firearm nor is there a permit that exempts any person from the background check requirement.")
Edit: Especially the kind that would post about it on the internet and snitch on themselves and attract undue attention from the ATF.
But yeah, some very small percentage of people are stupid and/or criminal. 99.99% of gun purchases in the US happen through an FFL with a background check and everything.
Alot of states have classified pages where you can buy/sell firearms. Many states don't require background checks for private sales. People aren't paying a gun shop a FFL transfer/background check fee to hand over the gun to the buyer. Source: have seen many of these transactions at rod and gun clubs.
This trope is so tired, but since you did it, tell me you don't keep up with gun regulatory news without telling me.. The ATF has been on a rogue rampage the last 4 years.
https://trac.syr.edu/reports/733/include/figure1.png
"Rogue rampage" indeed.. almost 10% higher than pre-covid Trump convictions and about the same level as we saw under GWB! Then again, the average person convicted in 2023 had >2 prior convictions and over 7 prior arrests so maybe these are actually just criminals? Wish everyone would decide if we should enforce laws or not.
https://www.atf.gov/resource-center/fact-sheet/fact-sheet-fa...
https://www.gunowners.org/new-atf-rule-you-can-go-to-jail-fo...
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12679
https://myjrpaper.com/node/7745
They killed this guy over it.
https://saf.org/atf-swat-raid-that-killed-arkansas-man-raise...
All this was legal a few years ago. ATF decided to change the rules.
Also, they wanted to completely ban private sales, but a whistleblower blew the whistle and hopefully stopped them.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/atf-whistleblowers-sound-al...
So there's all that.
They did widen the definition of dealers, but it's still "a person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business to predominantly earn a profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms."
So casually selling guns to friends and family is fine and doesn't require a license or a background check unless your state requires it.
> They killed this guy over it. https://saf.org/atf-swat-raid-that-killed-arkansas-man-raise...
He had bought over 150 guns in the past 3 years, signed forms for each of them that he was buying them for his own use, and then immediately turned around and sold them, several to undercover Feds. He'd post up at gun shows with a table full of guns and then sell them for cash without paperwork. 6 of the guns he sold were found at crime scenes.. the result of the raid was unfortunate but the dude was exactly who should be targeted by laws like this.
Seriously, read the search affidavit if you think it was somehow inappropriate to target him: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vjer4Tr0SJhe6ZzkUDgkjaho4PH...
After reading the affidavit, it was written before the final rule. The affidavit was written 3/6/24 and the final rule didn't take effect until 30 days after 4/10/24. How do you square that?
https://www.atf.gov/firearms/final-rule-definition-engaged-b...
From the affidavit:
"9. Your Affiant knows the term "dealer", as defined in Title i8 USC 921(a)(11) of the GCA, means (A) any person engaged in the business of selling firearms at wholesale or retail; or (B) any person engaged in the business of repairing firearrns or ofmaking or fitting special ba:rels, stocks, or trigger mechanisms to firearms; or (C) any person who is a pawnbroker"
Change of the rule:
"Section 12002 of the BSCA broadened the definition of “engaged in the business” under 18 U.S.C. 921(a)(21)(C) to all persons who intend to “predominantly earn a profit” from wholesale or retail dealing in firearms by eliminating the requirement that a person's “principal objective” of purchasing and reselling firearms must include both “livelihood and profit.” The statute now provides that, as applied to a dealer in firearms, the term
“engaged in the business” means “a person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business to predominantly earn a profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms.” However, the BSCA definition does not include “a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms.” 18 U.S.C. 921(a)(21)(C)."
This matters because his firearm sales weren't his livelihood and could be argued it was a hobby. He made, I believe, $250,000 working for the state of Arkansas as his livelihood.
Apparently the lie, was that he stated on the forms was he answered yes on the question regarding if the firearms were for himself.
Here's another botched incident, not sure what they were thinking here. This certainly seems extra-legal.
In a similar raid last year, more than a dozen ATF agents wearing tactical gear and armed with AR-15s stormed the rural Oklahoma home of Russell Fincher, a high school history teacher, a Baptist pastor and a parttime gun dealer. Fincher now believes their goal was to scare him into relinquishing his Federal Firearm License.
“It was like the Trump raid. They called me out onto my deck and handcuffed me. My son was there and saw the whole thing. He’s 13 years old,” Fincher told the Second Amendment Foundation last year. “They held me on the porch for about an hour. I was surrounded by agents. One by one, they yelled at me about what I was doing. In my mind, I decided if they were going to beat me up over every little thing, I’m done. As soon as I said, ‘If you want my FFL, you can have it,’ one of the agents pulled out a piece of paper and said, ‘Well then sign here.’ He had made three copies in case I screwed one up. It was exactly what they wanted. I was shocked.”
Bottom half of this article.
https://saf.org/atf-swat-raid-that-killed-arkansas-man-raise...
Either way, I'm glad you pointed out the "personal collection," part.
I looked into the Fincher case, and it's another case that SAF is basically just lying about. They can run these insane headlines and then don't follow up...
Fincher had a FFL but no store, so he'd sell primarily at gun shows. He'd buy guns from other dealers or from manufacturers with his FFL, and then sell them in "private" sales at gun shows with no background check. It looks like the Feds caught onto that and then had a CI do a controlled buy where Fincher was told the purchaser was a felon, and Fincher didn't give a shit and illegally sold him ammo anyways.
Call me crazy, but a FFL doing straw purchases for AR lowers so he can sell them under the table at gun shows is exactly the kind of thing that the ATF should be shutting down.
Fincher indictment: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oked.35...
Fincher guilty plea (he got probation with no jail time - and the FFL who was holding all of the guns Fincher had purchased but not yet sold was ordered to sell them and give the proceeds to Fincher): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oked.35...
Looks like he sold him ammunition, not firearms. I'll look into it more.
I agree though, the propaganda machines are going full bore.
It is a simple page and I did not spot any inaccurate facts.
> There are almost no situations where you will not be buying your firearm from an FFL and you will have to fill out a permit.
I own 14 firearms and only 3 went through an FFL. Used firearms retain their value more than almost any other consumer good.
This varies from state-to-state. Some states allow private sale of individual firearms with no background check.
(... I wish I didn't have a reason to know this fact).
So is certainly not as easy as some states requirements for firearms.
I am making observations of an operating environment, and don't hold strong opinions on gun rights and similar. More, "What am I dealing with as someone who has to live here?"
Indiana is a bike ride away and has some of the loosest gun laws in America. I shoot suppressed there all the time.
I believe that manufactured suppressors actually are hard to get in the US in a way that is untraceable to the original purchaser, which makes them hard to get in illegal jurisdictions.
Guns are much more broadly sold and less restricted so I agree that they tend to be very available.
Suppressors/Silencers are federally regulated by the National Firearms Act (NFA) and are treated similarly to machine guns and sawed-off shotguns (the import/manufacture of those are further regulated by later legislation).
From Wikipedia[1]: Private owners wishing to purchase an NFA item must obtain approval from the ATF, pass an extensive background check to include submitting a photograph and fingerprints, fully register the firearm, receive ATF written permission before moving the firearm across state lines, and pay a tax.
And I think you may have understated the ease of manufacturing. Especially if someone only needs to use it once and don't care about the legality.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act#Registra...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
(these stats are grim, I admit, but important to contextualize my perspective and thesis about the risk)
But it's extremely incorrect-- suppressors don't silence guns. Suppressed firearms are still loud.
In the US where there are around 100 million gun owners, you can't say much about the group collectively other than they own at least one gun.
Lots of gun owners (including me) call them silencers.
If you have complaints about how language has evolved, you may contact Richard Stallman and ask him for advice.
the guy who eats his toenails? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ&rco=1
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/04/unitedhealth-cancels-investo...
Crazy, if true. Perpetrator knew many people in the area. Had to reduce the chance of raising suspicion. Although “silencers” (suppressors is the better term) are not very silent as depicted in films and tv, but do suppress the muzzle flash and suppress generated sound.
I guess in a crowded NYC, that’s just enough needed to escape the scene.
I'm not saying this is deserved, more that I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to just up and execute an insurance CEO.
Since they will all be increasing their rates soon to cover the expenses of 24/7 armed guards, armored vehicles, etc…
Edit: Or a reduction in service quality to cover the new expenses.
> How do they still have that many customers if their service was so bad?
Because the people making the decision to purchase UHC services and using UHC services are two wildly different demographics.
Do they have an effective monopoly in certain States?
Or are you implying the ‘pickers’ get special gold plated services completely different from regular employees?
That money has to come from somewhere, so a cheaper pick means more money available for other things like nicer employee lounges, free drinks, etc…
Unless you were being sarcastic in saying "yeah you're going to die sooner due to our poor healthcare choice, but hey, a free soda*!"
* remote workers get nothing
Besides that, most companies can afford free soda with or without terrible healthcare choices, so it seems totally orthogonal: free soda doesn't require bad healthcare choices and bad healthcare choices don't imply free soda.
It could of course be very delayed or simply be used primarily as pretexts for corporate infighting with a very low probability of such a linkage.
But nonetheless even in the worst case scenario, a very low probability for the median employee is still better than zero probability.
'We could theoretically spend greater than 0% of the savings on something that could be better or worse sometime in the future' isn't good enough on its own, and it's not convincing enough that it will ever happen, and if it does, it doesn't leave me convinced that the money will be spent on something better for me.
> even in the worst case scenario, a very low probability for the median employee is still better than zero probability.
The criteria to use here is, "do employees feel they're better off with the new, terrible healthcare plan, given any free sodas etc they might have received in exchange". If the employees wouldn't have voluntarily made the same choice for themselves, then it was a bad healthcare choice for employees.
Why would they all start behaving like charities?
https://www.propublica.org/article/evicore-health-insurance-...
Probably relevant
Edit: I would love to make $20/minute every day finding ways to drive people into medical bankruptcy, despair, and death, just like him, because being rich is awesome. :)
I wonder if the original commenter would have put the same comment if the article were "man shoots his wife and her lover on discovery of adultery"
People demand justice, whether they're right to is a secondary concern, as is the methodologies they choose to seek it. Some become activists. Some become politicians. Some pick up guns.
That is a true, but We should discourage and condemn them picking up guns. There is a feedback loop at play
Nonsense. They will and should pick up guns if the entrenched systems no longer serve the purpose of the majority. Sure, it's not ideal.
But sometimes it's the only way to enact change. Some of the most important rights we have today were won with violence.
It's not one we like, but nonetheless.
My point is that healthcare reform is obstructed by the fact that everyday American citizens want very different things and cant agree.
Like this is pure speculation right? But I have a strong feeling that, should the person be caught, we'll learn that they have or had a family member or even themselves insured with UHC who has suffered some harm, and that person felt UHC was responsible. Whether they were correct or not is immaterial: the CEO paid the price.
And you can feel whatever you feel about that, like I said, I don't want to live in a world where healthcare CEOs get gunned down in the street. But I also am acutely aware of how abusive insurance companies are, both from reading about those abuses in the news of others, and experiencing a handful of my own, and I also don't want to live in the status quo, where unelected, unaccountable private companies get to decide who lives, who dies, and who goes bankrupt via inscrutable bureaucratic practices.
In my ideal world, accountability would be these rich bastards getting hauled into congress and charged for the abuses their companies inflict on American citizens. But since our system seems unwilling to do that, if the alternative is they get to walk around just a bit scared that someone will [ censored for HN ]? Well, probably won't fix anything, but I'd be a liar if I said I'd lose a wink of sleep over it.
>But sometimes it's the only way to enact change.
>In my ideal world, accountability would be these rich bastards getting hauled into congress and charged for the abuses their companies inflict on American citizens.
My point is that these rich bastards are playing by the rules the American citizens set up. American citizens have the power to change those rules if they want, but cant agree on anything they think is better. People like to imagine a grand corporate conspiracy while ignoring half the population that want the opposite thing.
In my mind, it is the same type of vigilantism that justifies shooting up a school, LGBT club, or killing women who wont date you.
Mmmmmmm.... yes and no? Like it's cliche to blame everything on Reagan but the number of modern social ills that can be directly traced to the Reagan admin and the political movement behind it really does baffle the mind. Ills such as, for example:
- The deregulation of corporate finances, that permits the massive stock buybacks that allow corporations to kick absolutely stressful amounts of money to their shareholders and executives
- The tying of the hands of the FTC regarding anti-trust/monopoly regulation, which has led to the greatest era of corporate consolidation since Standard Oil, and all the problematic things that come with it
- The citizens united decision, which unleashed the ability for corporate America to pump shit fuck tons of money into political parties that would then work for their interests
- The repeal of the fairness doctrine, which let an entire wing of disinformation networks form and spread, masquerading blatant propaganda as news (sorry, "entertainment")
And like, you're right in one way, because the Republicans didn't come out to the American people and say "hey we want to enable corporations to rat fuck you for every dollar you have, along with every dollar you don't have, and to make them effectively the funding that both parties need to accept in order to have a snowballs' chance in hell of winning an election. Sound good?", obviously. But the various "mandates" that they've received from conservative voting blocs over the years are dubious as fuck, and if you scratch them just a little bit, you oftentimes find that their voters are so incredibly bullshitted at this point that they don't even truly know what the fuck they're voting for. Citation: literally in the last presidential race, there was a shit ton of people after the fact who both:
- Didn't realize tariffs would drastically increase the cost of goods in the United States, because exporters do not pay them, importers do (and in fact, if the rumors are to be believed, neither did their candidate)
- Voted for the party promising to repeal "Obamacare" despite receiving benefits from and in fact, needing the Affordable Care Act, not realizing that Obamacare is literally a made-up bullshit name given to the ACA by Republicans.
So like... yes, technically, the Republicans (and Democrats, make no mistake, their fingerprints are all over this shit too, just to a lesser degree) have built exactly the America that Americans want. However, it is impossible to fully divorce that from the just incredible amounts of propaganda Americans injest, both from the political parties who decide what is "feasible" to the corporate media.
It is like there is a deep denial that real humans often want something different, and that we are forced to share a democratic society with them, which means losing on issues where we think we are right.
- random Internet comment in response to the execution of John Brown, 1859
-Random Internet comment in response to the colonial uprising and Declaration of Independence, circa 1776
The ammo box is not justified and should not be tolerated simply because someone doesn't get what they want. That route is a quick decent to societal collapse.
That is how you end up with your incels, anarchist, communists, and Christian fundamentalists shooting anyone who doesnt agree with them.
Why wonder if someone would make the same comment in entirely different circumstances? Why does it matter?
Increasingly, though, people in the United States feel that the rich and powerful have become effectively insulated from the legal system, such that the common person is denied any redress. At that point, one no longer feels any reason to continue working within the legal framework, because it seems clear that the framework is not at all "equal" under the law.
Hence, when all other options feel exhausted: murder.
And, frankly, I imagine this will only continue with time, unless this country decides to actually provide some mechanism to hold people in power accountable. Like, I'm frankly surprised no one has attempted to assassinate members of the SCOTUS yet recently, given that they enjoy a lifetime appointment to make wide-impacting, scrutiny-free decisions.
They're not insulated from the legal system, the problem is the public is being misled.
It works like this: The media lies to the public and tells them that a CEO or Public Figure is getting away with X, so they get some washed up lawyer to do an opinion piece on it, a politician or two co-opts it, and possibly throws in some bait about the working class being screwed over, and then the public buys the made-up story- hook, line and sinker.
Since TV Law is not the same thing as real law, the person in question is put through actual due process and the allegation or accusation turns out to be unsubstantiated. The public then feels outrage because "The man on TV said this person was a criminal and he got away!".
Fundamental to this is that people are increasingly siloed and have little idea how closely the legal system reflects the will of the majority. They just think that their opinion is the majority and anything that deviates is the product of a corrupt system and public disenfranchisement.
Furthermore I'm quite wary of hand waving arguments about the "will of the majority". "The majority" just complained about price inflation, while electing the former president that approved most of the monetary inflation they were complaining about, while he was actively promising even more inflation. And that is on a topic the average person should be able to understand! Never mind more subtle points about the downstream effects of more abstract policies. The way I see it, most everyone is extremely frustrated with the current system (hence spitefully voting for more destruction by President Inflation). But most of the energy gets used up arguing about which direction we should go, while the corporate machine stands ready to latch onto and nullify whatever attempts at reform that may arise.
Furthermore even taking that argument at face value, it takes for granted how much we still do enjoy - even people on the shit rungs of society. The US military and world alliances making it so that we don't have to worry about military invasions, USD as the reserve currency making it so what we consider high price inflation is actually quite tame, bureaucratic authoritarianism keeping corporate authoritarianism from completely taking over, federal law enforcement keeping armed gangs in check. The economic meat grinder wealth/hope extraction machine is abjectly terrible, but also things can be so much worse.
Consider the Yotta/Synapse situation. Many people have lost a huge sum of money and the two companies involved are simply shrugging and saying they have no clue where it went. In many countries, either this problem would've never been allowed to occur in the first place or the government would start jailing people from the top down until someone starts to talk.
Rightly or wrongly, we now have a situation where a lot of people believe that they no longer benefit from society, and are in fact harmed by it, while they also see a few benefit greatly. I believe this is why many people who understand the implication of that choice would still rather vote for Trump, who promises to break things, than for Harris, who would have only made minor changes.
This is not advocacy for anything. I think these people are perhaps not exactly wrong, but they don't correctly estimate the cost of breaking a democratic system, even a poorly working one.
The point is just that it's a tale as old as human civilization itself. It would be disappointing if we've not yet learnt enough from our history to avoid more change via trauma.
"You rule because they believe," in essence.
(This is why, historically, you'll often see societies keep their pattern of government until, say, famine comes along. Because if you're going to starve to death, the likely outcome calculus on picking up a 2x4 starts to change drastically and quickly).
The (rare, perhaps crazy) people who shoot CEOs or armor bulldozers are what check the power of the state to ignore this part of its job.
The law is written on paper but fueled by blood.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-i...
In a just world, sadly, this man would have been slapped with a class action case with a 1000 times the ferocity the ex-CEO of Steward Health is getting, and both he and UnitedHealthcare would be painstakingly charged for the tens of thousands of manslaughter cases he would be liable for, that families of victims would happily testify to, whether due to denied care, or the stress or unsustainable and unjustified medical debt.
That would be justice, and that would the be the only way the insurance industry would have been seriously pushed to reform.