Luigi Mangione is alleged to have shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and even before he was identified, the reaction to the shooter was far different than other instances of gun violence. Today on It's Been A Minute, guest host Gene Demby talks with The Guardian's Abené Clayton about why Mangione is being praised by some, and why his alleged actions won't do much to fix the healthcare industry.And later on the show, a conversation with Dr. Laurie Santos, psychology professor at Yale and host of the podcast, The Happiness Lab, on the surprising science of how gratitude can affect our brains.Support public media and receive ad-free listening & bonus content by joining NPR+ today: https://plus.npr.org/Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What happened in the shooting of Brian Thompson?
Thanks for having me, Gene.
All right, so first I got to set the scene a little bit. So it's been over a week since a masked gunman shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, outside a Manhattan hotel. This week, authorities identified and detained an alleged gunman, and he's being charged with murder. You've probably heard his name by now, Luigi Mangione.
And we kind of have to walk a very delicate line here because we're talking about, you know, violence here, a brazen murderer. which is pretty scary to think about for a lot of people. And at the same time, there's been a lot of praise and solidarity for this alleged gunman and his actions. I mean, just listen to some of these reactions.
Y'all saying murderer, I'm saying freedom fighter.
This dude might have been Batman.
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Chapter 2: Why are some people praising the alleged shooter Luigi Mangione?
How about we free Luigi and arrest the corrupt CEO?
The alleged shooter even got his own superhero-esque nickname, with some people on the internet calling him the Adjuster. And on the other end, there are reports of CEOs across industries being scared for their lives, beefing up their security details, removing their identities from their companies' websites.
All right, Abine, as somebody who covers gun violence, how would you characterize the reactions we've been seeing to this shooting? And how have these reactions been different from the normal reactions to violence?
You know, it is violence... hitting somebody who a lot of people feel like typifies the inequalities that lead to other forms of violence. You know what I'm saying?
Obviously, we are not condoning murder. And this is an awful tragedy for his family. But the response is... it reminds me a little bit of the way when you read about like Bonnie and Clyde, right? They were doing these really horrible things where they were killing people, they were robbing banks, but there's also during the great depression and people are very, very angry at bankers, right?
You know, banks that basically tanked the economy and, you know, people have lost their livelihoods, they lost their homes. And so because they were robbing banks, it was seen as a sort of, even though what they were doing wasn't sort of vigilantism, right? It wasn't sort of resolving any of the situations that people found themselves in.
They were also going after or hitting the pockets of people that were really, really unpopular. And this feels kind of like that kind of folk hero thing.
I think the Bonnie and Clyde thing is quite accurate. Yes, this was a very public and hard to watch, traumatizing act of violence that will impact his family for years to come. And also, what does he represent? What's the backdrop, right?
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Chapter 3: How do reactions to this shooting differ from typical gun violence responses?
Yeah, I mean, it's something that we don't really think about as, you know, violence.
But just last year, the American Medical Association reported that a third of the physicians they surveyed, and they asked a thousand physicians, a third of them said that they'd seen delay or denial of care due to prior authorization lead to, you know, either serious adverse health effects for their patients or even death.
Why do you think people have a harder time seeing what happens to people like us on the business end of insurance companies' decisions as violence, but we can see gun violence more clearly as the destructive thing that it is?
Yeah, you know, that's a good question. I think it is violence, right? To me, by definition of what harm and violence is, I would absolutely put it in that category. But I think in the U.S., we have such a narrow framework of whose victimization deserves to be remediated. I hear it all the time when I write about shootings that happen, you know, in our hoods across America.
Someone can straight up be shot and killed, a young 22 year old. And it's like, well, that's no victim. Is that violence or is that someone getting, you know, all these like flippant comments that now are kind of directed at this CEO. I've seen befall people with no power. Very little money, honestly, whose communities have been scarred by the extractive nature of industries like health care.
It's violent. But obviously, Brian Thompson is not a young black boy on the corner who's unfortunately gunned down. But to see his victimhood also questioned in this way is it's been interesting to to watch. Hmm.
We should also know here that we do know, at least the police said, that the bullets he used had inscribed on them the words deny, defend, and depose. And that echoes a phrase commonly used to describe the alleged tactics that insurers use to avoid paying out insurance claims to their customers. And UnitedHealthcare, we should say, is the biggest health insurance company in the country.
And it was just slammed last month in a Senate investigation for denying people certain types of care as a way to boost the company's profits.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of healthcare decisions on violence?
Like, honestly, when I first heard the news, I thought about when my wife and I were going through our long, arduous IVF journey, not long after we conceived and had our son, I'm so thankful for, one of the big clinics in our area informed its patients that our health insurance was dropping coverage for that clinic.
And so that didn't impact me and my wife directly, but we just could not stop thinking about all the other folks That we would see like in the waiting room, right? The people who are in the middle of treatment and suddenly they were going to have to pay out of pocket if they could, right? To try to start a family.
And it's just like very financially and emotionally devastating news that must have been to them, right? Because these are choices about their lives that are out of their hands. And it all kind of happened on a dime through the decisions of some healthcare executive or somebody with an actuarial table somewhere.
Then when you see documents that show how sometimes arbitrary these decisions are, people's lives are being played with. You know what I'm saying? So that a spreadsheet is balanced. And that's a recipe for resentment. One thing that is usually a component of why someone shoots someone else is around resentment.
grievance right you have done me wrong and it sounds like and obviously we don't know like luigi is innocent till proven guilty he hasn't made any statements it's unclear what his motivations are but based on the context and the information that we have now it appears that a part of the thinking was like you have hurt all these people sending this signal is worthwhile i mean on that point right i've seen a lot of people
criticizing how the media has been covering this, like how the public is riding with this alleged shooter and the media hasn't been able to capture that sentiment. How do you think the reactions of the public differ from what you've seen, from the way you've seen this covered?
You know, when I knew that I'd be coming on to talk about this topic, I started paying more attention to cable news. And I saw people straight up like, Right. And say, oh, and there's this like disgusting perversion and people loving it and like having that become a part of the story feels incredibly tone deaf. Right. And I'm also concerned that mainstream media.
national news is putting the same sort of burden of badness, if you will, on people getting their jokes off on the internet, on people who are saying, who are telling their stories, right, of these horrific outcomes because of shoddy healthcare coverage. They're putting those on the same level as folks who have actually contributed to that harm, right? Like you can't,
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Chapter 5: How does the media coverage influence public perception of the shooter?
say that you're just as bad as the billionaire who is buying up these homes and selling them at exorbitant rates. You're just as bad as that person because you got a joke off about Brian Thompson. That's just not true. We can't equate those. And I think that doing so will only lead to more alienation and lead people to double down. You know what I'm saying? It's dangerous.
You know, it was really interesting to see Ben Shapiro, you know, famed right wing pundit sort of lamenting the air quotes, the less response to the shooting and taking glee. His audience clapped back at him really pretty hard. It was like, nah, this is not a left thing. We are very angry at these people, too.
Like, we don't have tears to shed for these people as well, which is really interesting to watch them have to metabolize the fact that this wasn't like partisan schadenfreude. This was like a thing that is felt broadly across ideological categories.
The polarization you mentioned, whenever there is a high profile kind of vigilante style shooting, it's usually pretty evenly split along party lines, right? You think of Trayvon Martin, of Ahmaud Arbery, you know, so many folks who were shot by usually a white or white adjacent person who said, I'm taking the lawn to my own hand.
Usually you can rely on how people are going to feel about that, on who they voted for in their politics. And I think they were going to see the alleged shooter as this sort of like Antifa figure who their base would reject. But their base, I'm sure, was among the Americans who were like, yeah, I got health care, but it don't work for me.
And that has just thrown people into a warp that is really interesting to watch. But I worry won't end in root cause solutions, as most mass shootings don't.
I keep thinking about when we cover like police violence on Code Switch, one of the things we always have to like remind people is that like these individual cases, they often unearth like all this feeling. Anger that people have over historical racism, right? Like it all comes to bear on these individual cases.
But there's no way the actual resolution of these cases like in an American court, right? Like- It's going to resolve all those issues. Right. And so I imagine that the trial for Luigi Mangione is going to be really, really heavily covered. Right. Maybe even like OJ levels of coverage. Right.
But then what's going to happen is that people are going to like think of the verdict as reckoning with all this other stuff that this case is unearthed. And it can't do that. The verdict is only about this case. It's only about who shot whom, who was where. I wonder what that means for how we do or don't resolve all that other stuff.
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Chapter 6: What can gratitude teach us about coping with societal issues?
Chapter 7: How can we address grievances without resorting to violence?
I'm going to take a quick break, but we have so much more to dig into. I'll be right back. Even just you talking about it actually kind of like spreads warm throughout. When you put it that way, it makes me think of something that I noticed that my husband does. He always thanks me for doing normal stuff.
So like if I got him a glass of water or if I did the laundry, you know, just things like around the house that normally, you know, everybody's supposed to do. And honestly, a lot of the time he's doing more of. But I noticed it was so nice because it made me feel like he had noticed my effort to do something, to be thoughtful or noticed my effort just to like... You feel seen.
Not to be thoughtful, but just to be considerate. Yeah. And even just that act of noticing really had such an impact on me. And it's something that I have made a point of doing for him as well all of the time. So, I mean, I'm sure if somebody were to observe, they'd be like, are you really just thanking each other constantly for... like doing everyday stuff. But it's nice.
It's nice to feel like somebody notices. And I think the noticing is part of it, too.
And this is another kind of honestly, psychologically, a little strange thing about gratitude, which is that we don't really get used to it as much as we think. So most good things in life are subject to what's called hedonic adaptation. We get used to it, right? You know, so if you...
won the lottery today and won the lottery again tomorrow and won the lottery again this weekend, like all of a sudden you'd be like, all right, I'm bored with the money, right? You know, if you eat the same kind of, you know, flavor of ice cream cone over and over and over, even if it's delicious at first, you get bored. But gratitude doesn't seem to work that way.
You know, a compliment that you're given on day one, if you get a new compliment on day two, if you're thanked on day three, it tends to sort of have the same kind of happiness impact over time, right? And that's awesome because it means that like, you know, you're not even though you said like, well, you know, we just go around thanking each other. You don't actually get sick of it.
It still has the same kind of happiness impact and the same relationship building impact. And that's relationships, you know, with our spouses and our partners. There's also lots of evidence that gratitude in the workplace can be incredible for people's performance. One study by the psychologist Adam Grant looked at this.
He actually tested individuals who had a kind of thankless job, university fundraiser callers. So these are like the students at your old college who call you for money, you know, total hang up on them, total thankless tasks, right? So he wanted to know, okay, what are the kinds of things that would improve their performance, you know, get them to make more calls, maybe make more money?
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