1. The difference is Brian Thompson deserved it. Brain Thompson was a legitimately evil person who - in a system where consequences can happen to the rich - would have been severely punished and/or executed for the harm he has done.

And therein lies the problem. We are not in a system where consequences can happen to the rich. People like Brian Thompson can abuse the public at large for his own gain. They’ve purchased congress, they have purchased the white house, they have purchased the courts, they have purchased the police.

All legal recourse has been denied to the average citizen. Voting, writing congressmen, petitioning, picketing, protesting…these things have no effect on public policy or corporate behavior. The rich own the government, the government will do what the rich people want it to do. They’ll never arrest a rich person for, say, torturing millions of people.

The soap box fails, the ballot box fails, what’s left is the ammo box. The men who wrote our founding documents fought a grape shot, musket ball and bayonet war for the chance to write them; the idea that - when all else fails - things sometimes have to get fucking ugly was on their minds. Hence the constitutional right to bear arms in this country, with the implication being sometimes you’ve got to walk up to a rich and powerful person who is doing a lot of harm and catastrophically damage his vital organs.

I’ll leave this topic with this: I’ve seen topics of discussion here on Lemmy that read something like “You say marriages used to last before no-fault divorce? Naw, it’s just women used to murder their husbands a lot more.” And the comments section of these were nothing but cheers and applause. The overall Lemmy community is perfectly fine with that. A person in a lower position of power and an intolerable position takes the opportunity to end the life of a person in higher power over them to escape that intolerable position. It’s okay when a wife kills her husband because he’s beating her, right Lemmy? So it must also be okay when an ordinary citizen kills an oligarch because the oligarch has been denying them necessary healthcare. “He was beating me so I killed him.” “He was keeping me from getting treatment, so I killed him.” The difference I see is there are people who aren’t saying “You go girl” to the second one.

2. Probably but whatever.