Roeder and Mangione

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

On May 31, 2009, Scott Roeder walked into the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, and shot an usher, George Tiller, in the head.

Tiller wasn’t just an usher, though. He was also a physician who — and this is what so vexed Roeder — performed abortions at Wichita’s Women’s Health Care Services. At his trial, Roeder, who was eventually convicted of murder, told the jury that after he became born-again in 1992 — he had been watching The 700 Club — “I knelt down and I accepted Christ as my savior.” He also told the jury that a year later, in 1993, he began thinking about killing Tiller. He said he was defending the lives of newborns.

Tiller’s wife was in church that day and watched her husband get shot in the head.

Roeder wasn’t the only one who wanted Tiller dead. Sixteen years earlier, Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon, also born-again, tried to kill him as well, shooting him five times while he sat in his car. She had also been charged and convicted of arson and using acid to stop abortions at other clinics.

Shannon and Roeder are — and this goes without saying — pro-life.

In the ’90s, Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group, posted names and address and photographs of those who worked at clinics such as Tiller’s. Women’s Health Care Services had been firebombed, the staff threatened. Bill O’Reilly, then at Fox News, called out “Tiller the Baby Killer” many times. After Tiller’s murder, when Operation Rescue was questioned about its involvement with and encouragement of Roeder, a spokesperson, Cheryl Sullenger, said that while it was true she had spoken to Roeder, she said he always made the initial contact.

As gruesome as Tiller’s murder, in some respect what followed was even worse.

Rev. Rusty Thomas, was the director of Operation Save America at the time, said, “He died the way he lived. His was a bloody death. Someone ‘chose’ to end George Tiller’s life this morning, in his church.”

Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, could barely contain his glee about the killing, said, “George Tiller was a mass murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God.”

On a documentary about the case, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow commented, “Scott Roeder was linked to a number of different political and protest groups. One of the things that was hard to report on at the time was the widespread evidence of people celebrating the murder — it was all over the web, on Twitter, on Facebook, on blog comments.”

Which brings me to Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson, in New York City in December, and to a similar glee, only this time from the left. I’m not entirely convinced the response on social media truly reflected the nation’s pulse on this, but there has been a disturbing amount of praise and solidarity for and with Mangione. Amazon and Etsy had to remove T-shirts inscribed “Free Luigi” and “Deny, Defend, Depose” (words Mangione allegedly inscribed in the shell casings of the gun he used) from their sites, and a GoFundMe account for him has raised more than $200,000 for his defense.

After the shooting, Mangione, like Roeder, fled. He was arrested five days later in a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. Both Mangione and Roeder — Roeder in his statements in court and Mangione in a notebook he kept — expressed righteous indignation and certainty in their actions. Like Roeder, who had no direct involvement or experience with George Tiller, or with abortion, Mangione hadn’t been wronged by UnitedHealthcare. No one in his family had been denied coverage for any medical procedure by United or any other health insurance giant. Mangione was not avenging a loved one’s death at the hands of soulless insurance giants. He did not shoot Thompson on that street in Manhattan, drop the gun, and wait for the cops to arrest him to alleviate his personal hell, which might have changed the narrative some, had he been a grieving father or son avenging a murder brought on by corporate avarice and soullessness.

But that doesn’t matter to those supporting Mangione. They have created their own narrative.

The pistol recovered from his backpack at that McDonald’s was known as a “ghost gun,” those typically made with a 3D printer and tweaked from an FMDA Glock. The FMDA is an acronym for “Free Men Don’t Ask.” About 45,240 suspected ghost guns, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, were recovered from crime scenes between 2016 and 2021 — 692 of which were homicides or attempted homicides.

How come we’re not talking about this part of the story? Where is the outrage and apoplexy from the supporters of gun control that a lunatic made a gun at home and used it to commit a homicide? Was there none because one of those guns was used to kill a “bad guy”? Is that where we are? Because if it is, we on the left are as hypocritical and selectively outraged as gun fetishists say we are. Righteous indignation, no matter which side embraces it, is the slipperiest of all slopes. Those who are smiling about, much less celebrating, the actions of Luigi Mangione, as if it will somehow be a watershed moment in an admittedly awful, rapacious healthcare system — and will, by some magic, bring us to more equitable healthcare in this country — are fooling themselves. When it comes to those contextualizing killers like Mangione and Roeder, today’s left looks a lot like yesterday’s right.

As of yet, there is nothing like “Tiller the Baby Killer” to describe the sins of Brian Thompson, who leaves behind a wife and two children. But that may be because “Thompson” is tougher to rhyme.

Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter — quit laughing — and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. His latest book, “Jack Sh*t, Volume 2: Wait For The Movie. It’s In Color” is the follow-up to “Jack Sh*t: Volume One: Voluptuous Bagels and other Concerns of Jack Friedman.” He is also author of “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later,” “The Joke Was On Me,” and a novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages.” See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2025

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