Victims of a Commodified Society

On 28 July 2025, four people were killed in a mass shooting in their Park Avenue office tower in central Manhattan. Among the victims were Wesley LePatner, a senior executive at Blackstone and a mother of two, and Didarul Islam, an off-duty police officer working in private security who served as a building guard and management employee. The gunman, Shane Devon Tamura, aged twenty-seven, ended his own life after the attack.

Tamura was a former high-school football player. He left letters blaming the National Football League, headquartered in the same building, for the brain injuries he believed resulted from repeated trauma. His grievance was not personal but structural, seeing his life as derailed by institutions that elevated others while leaving him disabled on the margins.

Like so many similar incidents, this was not merely another chapter in the relentless American cycle of gun violence, which began, in my mind, with the on-screen spectacle of cowboys and Indians, showing Native Americans being annihilated over and over again by western settlers. From there to Clint Eastwood, the fastest gun killing indiscriminately often in the name of justice, these cultural icons now appear retrospectively as one long advertising strategy for the future burgeoning US gun industry. It has now become, at least for this writer, a parable of what happens when people are reduced to functional market value and usage: a world where human beings come to see themselves, and are seen by others, as assets or failures, winners to be rewarded or discards to be forgotten. And in the mind of the forgotten, their phallic potency can only be regained, like Clint, by shooting the bullets of failure and death into another.

II

This was not the first such tragedy. On 4 December 2024, Brian Thompson, Chief Executive of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed outside a Manhattan hotel. His alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, by now a folk hero in some quarters, engraved his bullets with the words delay