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A quick scroll of your comment history suggests you are happy to make an exception for CEOs.
Not saying I necessarily disagree, but only pointing out that the axiomatic statement you're making here isn't a universal truth, and might not even be true for you. I personally think that the death penalty should be reserved exclusively for people in positions of power who abuse that power -- call it a Sword of Damocles exception -- but an exception that still is.
The death penalty and killing in a war are not the same thing.
Well I am not happy to make an exception for CEOs (although I absolutely sympathize with what Luigi Mangione did and I understand why other people think it was a good idea). Brian Thompson's death is not going to get the incoming Trump administration to suddenly see the logic in socialized medicine. And before people start bringing up guillotines, it took 15 years to go from guillotining the king to go from Napoleon being crowned emperor with the same absolute monarchical powers.
I do not see any sort of systemic issue being solved effectively via vigilantism or capital punishment.
More importantly though, no one deserves to die.
No one.
Human rights do not get exceptions carved out of them. That means they aren't rights.
I respect your point of view, but I personally have long been of the opinion that one's human rights are contingent on one's humanity, which is a quality that one can degrade and destroy through acts of inhumanity. Societies have a right and need to defend themselves from amoral predators that do not respect the social contract, and in cases where that society has become so corrupt and sclerotic as to have de-facto predator and prey classes, vigilantism may even become justified. (To be clear I don't think it's good that it came to this, or that further escalation won't start to have terrible collateral damage, but there is a certain inevitability to it.)
I did some SWAGging as to how many deaths could be reasonably attributable to UHC's policy of excessive denials, and based on the studies I was able to find about mortality rates and delay of care, I conservatively arrived at a number of ~4,600 per year. Since Brian Thompson became CEO of UHC, that adds up to 17,000+ premature deaths. In another context he would have been standing trial in front a war crimes tribunal, but because our criminal justice system doesn't have a mechanism to handle homicides where the murder weapon is a contract dispute, he was on his way to tell shareholders about quarterly profits -- profits earned from the immiseration and death of thousands --when he was shot.
I won't say that Brian Thompson deserved to die, but I will say this: Nobody calls it murder when an antelope gores the lion.
Okay, but will it actually have any positive results considering what is happening at the end of January? That's where many people here lose me. I absolutely understand and sympathize with what Mangione did. I don't even blame him for doing it even though I was not happy about it.
But you lose me when you think this is going to make a major change to the capitalist healthcare system which has become a massive part of the economy or if you think a corporation will ever put people over profits until they're legally required to do so.
Immediately, and in a vacuum? No, and you're right to fear that it will get worse before it might get better. But the wealthy and powerful have constructed a society that insulates them from consequences for committing vast amounts of (banal, legally-sanctioned) violence against the broader public. Mangione's actions, and more importantly the public response to them, are a demonstration that there can still be consequences for that kind of predatory behavior, even if it's state-sanctioned and protected, and at the end of the day consequences lead to changes in behavior.