Killing people with paperwork instead of a gun doesn’t make you any less of a murderer

At this very moment Luigi Mangione, who is accused of shooting UnitedHealthcare’s CEO last month, is sitting in a federal jail cell in Brooklyn. He’s got a barrage of court appearances scheduled and, once he has wound his way through the criminal justice system, he could be behind bars for the rest of his life.

Which, of course, is as it should be. While there are a lot of reasons that many people find the 26-year-old alleged assassin sympathetic, you can’t just gun a CEO down outside a hotel in Manhattan and face no consequences for it. And Mangione, who is, by all accounts, an extremely smart guy with an Ivy League education, should really have known better. He should have known that if he wanted to murder someone – and get away with it – there were far more socially acceptable ways of doing so.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist