Armchair Assassins

What the UnitedHealthcare CEO Assassination Says About the Media, Guns, “Experts” and Keyboard Warriors

by Richard Baimbridge

Every once in a while, an event comes along that triggers a mad frenzy of speculation. This phenomenon tends to reveal the profound ignorance of the media, while at the same time suddenly turning large swaths of the population into self-anointed “experts” raging war with one another in the YouTube comments section.

A few examples are Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished without a trace shortly after take-off on March 8, 2014, never to be seen again – possible explanations for which, CNN speculated, included aliens and black holes. And, most recently, the assassination of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in Midtown Manhattan last week. 

Video footage of the shooting shocked viewers, who said it looked like something straight out of a Hollywood movie. Almost immediately, the media began trying to figure out whether or not the killer was a professional hitman, what kind of weapon he used, and why it kept malfunctioning. And this is where things very quickly began to go off the rails…

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m far from being an “expert” when it comes to either guns or shooting, let alone assassinations. And yet, I noticed some things right off the bat that surprised me once the “experts” began appearing on the news to share their “expert opinions.”

The first thing was that it wasn’t at all obvious to me that the assassin’s gun “jammed”, but that he might in fact be manually cycling it. Or, at the very least, that he was very clearly anticipating having to rack the slide. Yet the only thing the “experts” talked about was Glocks jamming with subsonic ammunition, and that any professional hitman would have known that, therefore this guy had to be an amateur.

One of the “experts” then took out a Glock 19 and demonstrated a “stovetop jam.” Now, I’ve heard of “stovepipe” jams before, and Stovetop Stuffing…but stovetop jam, that was a new one!

Another thing that seemed clear to me was that the shooter had a decent level of gun experience and had spent a great deal of time planning the attack. Thus, it seemed highly unlikely that he hadn’t spent time at the range practicing with subsonic rounds, wouldn’t have known how his gun would perform during the shooting, and simply never considered using a booster.

Meanwhile, the “experts” were busy explaining to the news anchors that “silencers” are fictional (despite the fact that Hiram Maxim called them “silencers” in his 1908 patent, and the company he founded is still called “Maxim Silencers” today). So, both sort of came off looking kinda foolish to me. It was at that point that I first saw someone in the comments section mention B&T’s Station Six-9 Pistol.

I’d honestly never heard of the gun before, so I decided to look it up – and sure enough, it made a lot of sense. If you watch a video of this gun being fired with 9mm subsonic rounds, it’s so damn quiet that the plinking is twice as loud as the shots. The design is a modernized version of WW2-era pistol called the Welrod used by the British special forces, specifically for assassinations. It’s also not cheap, clocking in at around $2000 -- and there aren’t that many of them just floating around. Plus, they require an NFA tax stamp, which means handing over your information to the ATF — not something most assassins would be inclined to do.

A day or two later, the B&T theory started gaining traction – albeit, sharply divided between those 100% certain it was a Six-9, and those 100% certain it wasn’t. Meanwhile, the media was 100% certain that it was a veterinary gun – namely, B&T’s VP9, which is most commonly used by police and veterinarians for putting down sick and wounded animals.  

The naysayers argued that the bolt-action B&Ts require a drawing back and rotating motion to cycle a round, whereas the shooter was clearly just racking his slide straight back. By this time, I was to the point of squinting at zoomed-in, slow-motion grainy videos on endless playback loops. And even then, I still couldn’t tell, either way. (One of the best videos I’ve seen explaining the B&T guns is ironically from a music teacher down in Texas. You can watch it here.)

Yet the “expert” videos kept on coming. Some saying the shooter was clearly an amateur, based on rookie errors like x, y and z…others speculating he was ex-military or a professional hitman playing a game of 4D chess in order to throw investigators off his trail.

Those in favor of the “amateur” theory have pointed to the distinctive grey backpack the assassin wore as being one of his dumbest “mistakes.” Why would a professional hitman wear an easy-to-recognize backpack like that during a job? And why toss it in Central Park, where police were certain to find it?

Well, the police did indeed find the backpack recently…and it was stuffed full of Monopoly money. I’m guessing neither the cops, nor the “experts” were anticipating that.

Meanwhile, the motive has shifted from a disgruntled insurance customer (as evidenced by spent casings with the words “deny”, “defend”, “depose” carved into them) to the fact that Thompson was under investigation by the DOJ, related to a $100 million insider-trading scandal. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to think that someone might’ve wanted to silence him, and that they’d likely hire a man with experience to do the job. 

At this point, the only things I’m certain of is that the media is clueless, the “experts” aren’t much better, and that my dreams of walking into a gun store and buying a suppressor over-the-counter probably aren’t going to be helped in any way by this incident.

In terms of the shooter, himself – amateur or hitman? What weapon he used? Why the gun behaved the way it did? I don’t pretend to have the answers, and nothing would surprise me at this point. The only thing I’m fairly confident of is that he wasn’t an alien, and he didn’t vanish into a black hole…. But, then again, I could be wrong about that, too.  

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