And maybe silenced? seems like professional hit from details so far.

Are there scenarios where the police could fail to investigate, knowing the reputation of the shaddy insurance?

Though they are illegal in New York.

That's basically propaganda and half-admits it on the site. There are almost no situations where you will not be buying your firearm from an FFL and you will have to fill out a background check form and have a waiting period.

The only private sales that happen are among criminals and within families. Regular people aren't going to risk the kind of charges that stem from misuse after a private sale. Certainly nobody with a legitimate business and livelihood to protect.

Don’t even need a proper gun. 3D print a ghost gun or the firing mechanism (I forget what it’s called) and suppressor. No traceability.

A suppressor requires a federal tax stamp and (at least as of a few years ago) submission of fingerprints to the atf.

So is certainly not as easy as some states requirements for firearms.

Suppressors are not equally easy to legally procure!

Suppressors/Silencers are federally regulated by the National Firearms Act (NFA) and are treated similarly to machine guns and sawed-off shotguns (the import/manufacture of those are further regulated by later legislation).

From Wikipedia[1]: Private owners wishing to purchase an NFA item must obtain approval from the ATF, pass an extensive background check to include submitting a photograph and fingerprints, fully register the firearm, receive ATF written permission before moving the firearm across state lines, and pay a tax.

And I think you may have understated the ease of manufacturing. Especially if someone only needs to use it once and don't care about the legality.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act#Registra...

They are called silencers. It's the number one definition for the word in my dictionary.

The original use case was hearing protection. The modern tactical use case is that it makes it somewhat harder to tell where a shot came from. In almost no scenario does it actually make a gunshot quiet (maybe a subsonic .22).

Off-topic, but the US is, oddly, a bit of an outlier compared to some of our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic, where buying one can be an over the counter transaction. It's weird to be in a situation where the US is more restrictive in anything related to firearms, but I assume the European attitude is that it reduces nuisance when gun ownership is more regulated at the front end.

They're called suppressors among gun nerds. But silencer is the standard term in American English.

If you have complaints about how language has evolved, you may contact Richard Stallman and ask him for advice.

As someone who endured UHC for several years, I assure you there is no service quality to reduce.

> How do they still have that many customers if their service was so bad?

Because the people making the decision to purchase UHC services and using UHC services are two wildly different demographics.

As if they couldn't just buy that without increasing prices and still make a gazillion dollars.

I think we can be pretty confident that he wasn't shot because an AI product wasn't accurate.

No, but this is a case where incorrect AI decisions may legitimately contribute to people's deaths. Let's also not normalize the idea that it's OK for people to die so one of the most profitable companies in the world can make even more money.

I don't think the parent poster is doing that, I think they are pointing out that when the ai products are faulty and result in the predictable deaths or suffering of people, someone out there might get angry enough to make bad choices.

This is not even remotely close to the "big issue" with UHG. There's probably no individual company that's responsible for more dysfunction in the American health system than UHG.

Not that I think it justifies murdering the CEO, but also such is the nature of systematic violation of massive numbers of people's sense of justice.

Or you could say let's not normalize broken AI in health care related systems, but potato potato I guess.

I doubt anyone on HN would have any interest in normalizing that practice. But almost everyone who will be wronged by these systems are going to be up in arms.

I think we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future. Your car killed my mother and the law said it was fine. Your insurance company denied my grandma's claim and she died in agony after paying premiums for 30 years.

Let's just hope that autonomous drones don't become trivially capable as weapons. At that point, everyone from the President and your local police chief to the chairman of Bank of America and the local ambulance chasing lawyer who sued the wrong guy's mom after she hit someone in a car accident would be in a very bad situation.

We should really try to get this under control before it gets out of hand.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, or that I feel that killing is OK, but as others have expressed throughout this thread, it feels weird to say stuff like that in regards to a company that itself has normalized letting people die for the sake of higher profits.

presumably a company that is violating the intentions of anti-trust laws

I'm really surprised that we don't see violent action like this from terminal patients who have nothing to lose.

Same here. With as many guns and victims of corporate greed that we have, I'm actually pretty shocked that we don't see this happening as routinely as, say, school shootings.

I wonder if we'd see slightly more ethical behavior from corporations if their C-level staff and board members had to routinely practice lock-down drills because they were getting offed once a week.

I don't know how to write this comment in a way that won't land me in a CIA black site so I'll just start with a disclaimer that this post in no way celebrates or condones any violence, but I wouldn't be surprised if political assassination attempts go up 10-fold in the next 10 years. We already saw two different assassination attempts against Trump during the lead up to the election. You can read my older comments to know my political leanings, I don't like Trump. But wow, I'm genuinely more worried about the stability of our society because of increases in violent acts like this and the inevitable retaliation by the government against all people in the name of "security", than anything Trump could enact.

I wouldn't be surprised if New York passes new gun control laws because of this shooting; I wouldn't be surprised if there's a congresscritter or White House Staffer or judge who's assassinated in the next several years causing some kind of martial law situation. It's scary times we live in right now.

Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1958

I think people skip over this a LOT, but it's the basis for society and was long before we had the means to track down most killers and bring them to any sort of justice. Most people, even when given freedom from consequences and ample opportunities, are not murderers.

>Laws and rules only matter so long as we're all willing to believe they do.

And everyone has seen it thrown in our faces for a year or so now what the blatant two-tiered system looks like. On a longer time scale if you want to count the lack of consequences for those behind an attempted coup in 2021 and a recession that harmed millions of lives in 2008.

If the government won't hold people accountable, and people are pushed to their ends, then things like this can happen. As OP stated, thankfully, it doesn't happen as often as one would think given our society. It does take a lot to murder someone else.

Even the Secret Service doesn't have a great track record for preventing attempts. Their presence puts some stress on the perpetrators, which does help, and they are good at preventing quick wide-open follow-ups to a miss or partial success, but they're bad at preventing the first shot or two. And I don't think it's because they're exceptionally bad at what they do, but because if someone really wants to take a shot, entirely stopping them is a hard problem by the time they're already close and armed.

Are they? I thought homicides committed outdoors, with a gun, between people of no or distant social connection were basically unsolvable. Even for a rich white victim. Unless this guy dropped his wallet, used an exotic caliber, or is somehow connected to a prior threat, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he is not found.

Not this commenter, but how I've often heard it expressed was we created the justice system as a better, more civilized alternative to putting people in holes just outside of town. At such a time the justice system stops working, as it increasingly seems to have RE: the rich, then we resume holes.

He means that if the state, courts and other systems don't get people justice or something you can squint at and call justice when they are wronged some fraction of those wronged will go outside the systems and seek to get even instead.

The (rare, perhaps crazy) people who shoot CEOs or armor bulldozers are what check the power of the state to ignore this part of its job.

Sure, but there's a lot of speculation that it was a wronged customer. It could have been someone he works with. It could have been someone from his personal life. People who are not Healthcare CEO's also are murdered, there are lots of possible motives.

We don't even know that the killer got the right person.

There's an ongoing "all the big liberal cities are scary" vibe in much media that's been internalized by a large proportion of the population.

I know multiple people (and have myself experienced this) who've been greeted with warnings and concern from relatives when traveling to major cities... when those cities have violent crime rates far lower than the places they/we live. Like, a fifth as much or lower. It's still "common knowledge" that e.g. Manhattan is way more dangerous than a "safe" red state suburban/exurban county (LOL, very not necessarily true) and that the largest cities must be way more dangerous than small and mid-sized cities (also very not necessarily true).

There's literally propaganda on Fox News going on right now blaming or at least connecting this to undocumented migrants.

https://bsky.app/profile/justinbaragona.bsky.social/post/3lc...

anti-oligarchy could be.

America has much worse inequality than during the French Revolution, just for reference

The majority of members of those groups are federal informants or agents.

I dont agree with the term Palestinian terrorism, when the exact same actions by zionists are called "Zionists insurgency against the British Empire"

not a gun dude, but I read that it is common when using "subsonic rounds" for quieter shots.

Perhaps subsonic rounds that did not have enough charge to drive the slide. It looks like there may be a suppression device on the end. My first thought was home made.

A bit technical:

Automatic and semi-automatic weapons work the way the do because force of the round (recoil) pushes back the bolt carrier, which a spring will then push forward again. Shot is fired, bolt carrier goes back, spring pushes it forward.

Subsonic ammunition have less charge than regular ammunition, to reduce the velocity. This also means less recoil. Combined with the spring now being too stiff, the bolt carrier will simply not move back far enough to successfully chamber a new round. So you have to manually chamber a new round between each shot. One solution is to use a light / less stiff spring that is adjusted to the force of the subsonic ammo.

Same principle for when shooting blanks.

there's so much nuance in an insurance company having billions left over every year after subtracting payouts from premiums! it's sooo complex and nuanced

> Your job dictates your insurance, not you, and most jobs [...]

This is answering the question with a very narrow focus on what any one person can do. Sure, when I filled out my job's open enrollment last month, there was no checkbox labeled "Evil Corporation Insurer (y/n)", but there's no inviolable law of nature that requires the US to be this way.