Was the UHC assassin a "pro"?

The greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate

Greetings from Read Max HQ! This week, a shorter missive than usual because I’ve been sick as a dog, on the subject of the UHC killer and how we imagine “assassins.”

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Like many Americans, I’ve found myself captivated by the story of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Brian Thompson outside a hotel in midtown on Wednesday morning by an unknown assailant, who shot the executive three times and fled on a bicycle, leaving behind three shell casings on which he’d apparently written “Deny,” “Defend,” and “Depose”--the three-pronged strategy health-insurance companies use against clients to avoid paying claims.

Thompson’s death has spawned an variety of fascinating and novel discourses online--management coaches on LinkedIn were posting stuff this week that started with the clause “While I do not condone violence,”--but the one I’m most interested in is the argument over whether or not the mysterious gunman was a “pro”": Was this just some, presumably disgruntled, UHC customer? Or was this an expensive, and presumably experienced, assassin? To put it in the terms I saw most frequently, was this more a John Q-type situation, or a Michael Clayton-type situation?

This conversation was, in aggregate, across hundreds of websites and servers and private chats, the most classic kind of forum debate: An only slightly elevated version of a middle-school argument, kept humming by an endless well of misplaced confidence.

There are very few things as popular online as speculative (but assertive) conversations about the activities of hitmen, assassins, spies, special-forces members, mercenaries, and other people whose jobs are secretive and violent. If you search “Tier One Operator” you will find hundreds of threads on Reddit and Quora in which people (I mean, let’s be honest: men) expound in paragraphs littered with forbidding acronyms (JSOC, SOCOM, DEVGRU, etc.) on the uses of and distinctions between various U.S. military special-operations forces, as well as loving descriptions of their tactical gear and debates about their missions.

Most of the guys posting this stuff are not themselves special forces, but are rather what Soldier of Fortune publisher Robert Brown called “Walter Mitty” types--fantasists and obsessives. They make up the audience for the thriving media ecosystem of “former special-ops guys with podcasts and YouTube channels and tactical brands,” whose charmingly bullshitty tales of past ops and whose purportedly informed, “here’s what I would do” analysis of fight videos and hypothetical combat situations are more or less direct descendants of Soldier of Fortune articles. Here, e.g., is John “Shrek” McPhee of S.O.B. tactical, which offers online firearms coaching as well as private in-person training, discussing the Thompson assassination on a podcast this week. (Heads up: The podcast video contains video of the actual killing.)

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Most content like this is purportedly “nonfiction,” and even gains some of its credibility by trying to distance itself from Hollywood depictions of mercenary/assassin/special-forces life (as in the endless popularity of “Real Life Navy SEAL Watches Black Hawk Down”-type content on YouTube). But all of it, from John Wick on the one end to Chris Kyle’s autobiography on the other, should probably be thought of as part of the same broad family of (to borrow a phrase from my friend Willy Staley) “cool gun guy” media, operating in a kind of feedback loop: ex-S.O.F. guys advise on action movies that in turn inform and shape how gun guys look and act and talk.

It’s all of this “cool gun guy” media, both fictional and not--Jocko Willink and Chris Kyle and r/JSOCArchive and Special Ops: Lioness and the Bourne series and The Accountant and John Wick--that serves as grounding for the “debate” about whether or not the UHC assassin is a “pro.” One reason the conversation can spin itself out so endlessly--without conclusion but with everyone sounding like a confident expert--is that most people are arguing not from any kind of “personal experience” with contract killers but from having consumed a lot of this media.

Indeed, very few people have “personal experience” with hitmen because “hitmen,” by most accounts, don’t really exist outside of movies. And movies are (and this is a point that often seems lost online) fictional. And even the hitmen that do exist tend not to be silenced-pistol-on-a-New-York-street types, more crash-a-Blackhawk-in-someone’s-backyard types.¹ If you go online looking to hire your own personal Agent 47, as many people do, you are almost certainly going to wind up finding your own personal F.B.I. agent who’s trying to fill his “entrapping dumb-asses” quota for the quarter. (This dynamic was dramatized in the recent Richard Linklater movie Hitman, but since that movie was, like John Wick, a work of fiction, we should probably not cite it as an authoritative source.)

But here’s the thing: If movies are able to fool people into trying to hire hitmen, why wouldn’t they be able to fool people into trying to become hitmen? Just as John Le Carré taught spies how to talk, and just as Wall Street taught dickhead bankers how to act, maybe cool gun guy media could teach people to be cool gun guys? I doubt this guy is a former Navy SEAL, but I guarantee you he’s watched all the Jason Bourne movies, and probably played through a few of the Hitman games. If that doesn’t make him a pro, I don’t know what does.

1. The infamous declassified C.I.A. “assassination manual” of 1953 generally recommends against the use of both firearms and silencers--though I’m genuinely not sure how much you’d want to trust the C.I.A. on this topic:

Firearms are often used in assassination, often very ineffectively. The assassin usually has insufficient technical knowledge of the limitations of weapons, and expects more range, accuracy and killing power than can be provided with reliability. Since certainty of death is the major requirement, firearms should be used which can provide destructive power at least 100% in excess of that thought to be necessary, and ranges should be half that considered practical for the weapon. […]

Silent firearms are only occasionally useful to the assassin, though they have been widely publicized in this connection. Because permissible velocity is low, effective precision range is held to about 100 yards with rifle or carbine type weapons, while with pistols, silent or otherwise, are most efficient just beyond arms length. The silent feature attempts to provide a degree of safety to the assassin, but mere possession of a silent firearm is likely to create enough hazard to counter the advantage of its silence. The silent pisto l combines the disadvantages of any pistol with the added one of its obviously clandestine purpose.