Thoughts On the Killing of Brian Thompson

Killing is wrong. There can be no question about that.

Killing is sin. It’s a grave sin to directly kill someone and in the best circumstances it’s also a crime; I think most of us can agree to that principle, whether we’re Catholic or not.

A just society would be one that assessed a grave penalty for every form of killing, and also gave people every opportunity to make their living and do all they had to do without ever being in a circumstance where they’d have to kill to survive. But even in a society where those aren’t the rules, killing remains gravely wrong.

For the Catholic, killing is such a serious act that it’s never allowed. The Church has given us a very tricky crossword puzzle of circumstances wherein we can react with deadly force, to protect ourselves or someone else from being killed, and not be committing a sin– I’ve talked about Just War Doctrine and the Principle of Double-Effect too many times to count already. But we can never directly kill anyone, as a means or an end. To do so would be a grave sin– even if it’s legal; even if the culture we live in is telling us it’s laudable. To kill consciously, with a clear idea of what we were doing and not caring about the consequences to our souls, would be mortal sin. That cannot change.

Killing is such grave matter, that we’re not even allowed to NEGLECT someone to death.

There are very clear circumstances when we can withdraw extraordinary means to eke out their lives to the last possible minute, if they’re dying anyway, and if the means are far too painful or too costly to be worth it. Hospice care for the dying is not a sin. But you must not withhold a treatment that stands a good chance of helping someone and just let them die because you don’t want to bother, or because you want them to die. That is also killing.

Life is so sacred that we’re not even allowed to let it slip away through negligence.

Shooting someone in the middle of the street for vengeance is grave sin. To plot ahead to shoot someone, carving phrases on the bullet and everything, sounds like it meets the conditions of mortal sin to me. It can’t be allowed, in a just society.

But what about the man who makes a profit, by neglecting other people to death?

I’m not talking about making enough money to feed your family because you’re between a rock and a hard place and you don’t know what else to do. I’m talking about a ten million dollar a year pay package. What if you made ten million dollars a year running a racket that was supposed to collect large sums of money from poor and middle class people, on the understanding that if those people got sick they could look to you to fund all or some of their treatment? And then, when the time came for you to cough up, you refused?

I’m not talking about someone who ran out of resources and said “I’m sorry, I can’t afford to help any more.” I’m talking about someone at the helm of an enormous and enormously wealthy corporation, whose day to day work was figuring out more and more savvy ways to refuse to authorize doctors to administer care that could help a person live, if they could only access it in time– in order to fatten the pocketbooks of shareholders who were already rich? And to refuse to pay for care once it was administered, so that people lived in fear of seeking medical help because they might be saddled with a bill that would ruin their lives– thus creating a likelihood that the terrified patients would neglect their own health, and get sick, and suffer and die because of events you set in motion to make money?

What if one of the ideas you’d proposed, to make even more money, was demanding a financial penalty of people who went to the emergency room for the wrong reason? So that people would be afraid to seek emergency care in the first place, and some of them might die while they wondered what to do? What if you knew very well that that would be the result, and you liked it because it would make you more money?

And what if, because you chose to use your God-given skills and intellect in this way, the corporation you ran was the very most effective deny-people-money-for-healthcare corporation in the country? Of all the corporations set up to milk money from people desperate for medical care and then not care for them, yours was notorious in the business for not caring the most? What if investors knew they could make more money buying stock in your corporation, because you were the best at neglecting people’s health?

What if 26,000 people died a year because they didn’t have health insurance at all, and everybody knew that and they lived in fear of becoming a statistic. So they just kept giving you their money, knowing it was a gamble, in the hope that you’d help them so that they wouldn’t be a casualty? And then you went and did all the evil I described with their money?

What if mothers felt their babies die inside of them because you deemed a pill to prevent a fetal death too expensive for your shareholders, and you got paid?

What if a father waited all weekend to take their child to the doctor’s office on Monday, because he was terrified of the financial penalty you’d exact if he went to the ER instead, and the child’s infection got out of hand with catastrophic results? And you got paid?

What if a gravely ill patient was informed that she wasn’t allowed to live long enough to see her grandchildren receive their First Holy Communion, because the doctor wasn’t allowed to try this treatment because the insurance refused to authorize it, and you got paid?

What if the breadwinner for a large family desperately needed an insulin pump or another expensive intervention, so they could be healthy enough to continue to go to work instead of so shaky they were disabled, and you got paid to leave them shaky?

What if somebody’s cancer went from stage zero and just needing a shallow cut, to a more advanced stage and needing the ugliest of interventions, while you were delaying their care so you could make money?

What if forty-nine million people were dependent on your permission to receive healthcare, and you regularly acted like this, five days a week, week after week for years?

And then, one morning, on your way to a fancy hotel, to a conference to fête the investors in your protection racket, fully intending to make even more money causing even more misery that day, you got shot?

The man who shot you will surely be caught and severely punished, and that’s as it should be. But what about you? What do you think would become of your soul?

Do you think you’d go to a better place than the man who etched “deny” on his bullet casing and waited for you?

Do you think a just Deity would see much of a difference between your daily work and the work of the assassin– except, of course, that your body count was much higher, and you were much more comfortable while doing it?

What would happen to you then?

What’s the difference between shooting a man in cold blood, and voluntarily participating in a society’s built-in eugenics machine? Is the difference ethical, or just aesthetic?

Killing is a grave sin, whether the law of the land directs a manhunt to catch and punish you for your crime or not.

In a society that worships money as the highest good, human sacrifice is excused if the price tag is high enough.

In a society that worships money as the highest good, we’re all in danger of excusing the killers who kill for enough money, instead of just for revenge.

There is a just Judge in a higher court, who sees rightly.