Why Did Luigi Mangione Invoke Self-Defense?
This guest post does not necessarily represent the views of the Duke Center for Firearms Law.
Luigi Mangione—who faces charges for allegedly murdering Brian Thompson, the CEO of the health insurance company UnitedHealth Group—has ignited the public imagination. The firearms law connection of the Mangione case is primarily the fact that he used a “ghost” gun, an issue on which there is a case pending at the Supreme Court. I want to highlight a different connection in this post: the fact that Mangione seems to have understood his actions as a matter of justified self-defense.
According to a New York Times account of the period of Mangione’s life preceding the shooting, Mangione was fascinated with another famous ideological killer, Ted Kaczynski (“the Unabomber”). As is often the case when the victims of planned violent action are chosen on an impersonal basis, both men wrote manifestos to publicly explain their motivations. Before writing his own, Mangione had posted online a favorable review of Kaczynski’s manifesto, which includes the following passage:
[Corporations] have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive? … Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn’t possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense?
It is unclear if Mangione already had decided to commit murder when he wrote the review, but it is a telling passage—whether as a rationalization of a concrete or general plan of action or as one step in a thinking process that led to such a plan. Mangione here not only utilizes self-defense as a justifying framework for killing a man who symbolizes a system, but more specifically he offers a lay argument for the necessity element of his self-defense claim.
By “claim” I do not necessarily mean a legal claim; it is hard to see such a defense succeeding in court. Mangione, though, is not speaking legalese and does not address a court; he is articulating a self-defense claim in a moral and cultural register. The gist of justification in this claim is the idea that, although the victim is symbolic, violence is still necessary for the most fundamental reason: “to survive.” The necessity element materializes because it is a case of last resort. All the non-violent options to avert the mortal threat have been exhausted, to no avail: “Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn’t possible.” Crucially, who precisely is responsible for posing this threat is very hard to discern. Mangione has had health issues and personal dealings with health insurance companies, but it appears that Thompson’s company was not among them and that there was no personal grudge against UnitedHealth Group. Rather, it seems that Mangione views such companies as the most odious representations of the ills of a much larger economic system.
Mangione allegedly killed one carefully chosen person, but the open-ended identity of the deserving victim is one of many characteristics that he shares with mass shooters. “On their face, mass shootings are pure aggression, and so may seem like the opposite of the defensive action which the Second Amendment protects,” I wrote in a previous post on this blog (excerpted from an article). I argued, however, that mass shooters and Second Amendment jurisprudence share a cultural script that positions the gun as the American man’s most loyal tool for navigating an alienated and alienating social world. Thus, pro-gun responses to mass shootings lament the absence of social institutions that might have cultivated a sense of communal cohesion and belonging, consequently preventing the violence induced by loneliness, yet at the same time encourage personal armament because indiscriminate violence is inevitable and all should view their neighbors as potential perpetrators, thereby augmenting a disaffected ethos. Mangione felt this tension too, particularly as it translates to the technological sphere. Another characteristic he shares with the typical mass shooter is having an active online life in which, ironically, he complained about the sense of alienation technology engenders (the “ghost” gun as well exemplifies his love-hate relationship with technology). In addition, there is the writing and publicizing of a manifesto (though Mangione’s is succinct, more a note than a manifesto); the idealizing of famous perpetrators that came before him and copycatting their methods, or at least drawing inspiration from them, to achieve similar media glory; Mangione’s demographics as a young, suburban, white man; and his involuntary celibacy. According to the Times profile, Mangione felt unable to become intimate with a partner due to severe back problems.
Mangione’s general grudge toward the socio-economic world was not confined to the health industry. Akin to many mass shooters, Mangione’s resentment seemed to him to justify a violent response with no particular culprit. But Mangione is not a mass shooter—he only killed one person, and that person was not chosen at random. Moreover, unlike mass shooters, he appeals to a legally and publicly accepted logic of justification: self-defense. Thompson was taken to pose a serious threat that must be defended against, and violence was seen as the only remaining recourse because all other options are futile or have failed. Here, a radically different intellectual atmosphere may be at play, which helps explain why Mangione has subsequently become a pop culture figure resonating well beyond fringe reactionary circles. For Mangione’s act has a quasi-revolutionary aura to it, appearing to be an act on behalf of the ordinary people against the arch-capitalists.
Mangione’s application of the logic of self-defense can be understood against the backdrop of a general inflation in the use of the concept of violence and myriad expansions in how we understand its meaning (a phenomenon lawyers should be particularly sensitive to and wary of). Ideas such as structural violence and systemic violence have gained traction alongside various other applications of the term to conditions we might have otherwise described as injustice, particularly distributional injustice. Under this view, if unjust distribution of power and resources result in material and dignitary harms to persons, which are no less severe than the results of one-on-one physical altercation, then we ought to de-personalize our understanding of violence and view it as a systemic phenomenon whose roots are not in individual evil minds and ill wills but rather in the underlying social circumstances. The fist is but a symptom of the graver kinds of violence perpetrated by the phone-calling and mouse-clicking of people who sit in offices dressed in suits and set in motion grand ominous social processes that translate into deprivation, inequality, and ecological harm that jeopardize life itself. This is of course put crudely, both for the sake of clarity and simplicity and because the nuanced theoretical frameworks are less pertinent here than their lay absorption.
As the argument might go, the threats that such non-physical violent acts pose are not only dire but also constantly imminent. Hence, every act of resistance is a matter of self-defense. One of the costs of this line of argument is the erosion of an ethical distinction between violent and nonviolent resistance, rendering survival and revolution (or violent protest vaguely in the service of a revolutionary cause) interchangeable. To illustrate, in an important book offering the first account of self-defense grounded in social theory, French philosopher Elsa Dorlin speaks positively of violent anti-colonial endeavors as a form of “aggressive defense” and “explosive defense,” reasoning that “history is only made through interruptions and shocks, when people ‘meet violence with violence.’” Put this way, it is hard to see what ideological aggression cannot be represented as defensive. Dorlin could have argued that the justifiability of violence depends on the justifiability of the cause it aims to further, but then the normative debate would revolve around the merits of political end goals and self-defense would be neither here nor there. When every instance of injustice is reduced to illegitimate violence, every advancement of social justice is reduced to legitimate counter-violence and its effectiveness becomes attached to finding a self-defensive outlet.
Indeed, no ideological agenda doubts the supreme ethical stature of self-defense. The strong will claim that this is due to the doctrine’s boundedness to inter-personal situations and its neutrality toward social power relations within them; the weak will deny said neutrality and claim that the doctrine is allocated such that it strengthens the strong and weakens the weak, and therefore its justifiability requires shifting power in the opposite direction. At the hands of the strong, self-defense is a form of hegemonic violence, but at the hands of the weak it can undermine hierarchies and thus do justice.
Luigi Mangione is such a fascinating figure because he encapsulates this curious convergence between a mass shooter persona and a revolutionary discourse. This convergence finds a shared anchor in the logic of self-defense, exercised against a person chosen for purely symbolic reasons and whose supposed deserving aggressiveness is primarily a predicate of his status.