Why are you spending any time rationalizing the opposite? I read quickly; it doesn't cost me much time to read a half dozen articles about Brian Thompson.

Maybe you're consuming different media than I am, and the sentiment you see is something like, "LOL OMG finally, let's all be like Mangione!" where your charge of missing out on second-order thinking is perhaps warranted.

But the media I consume--and I admit that I have a bias towards the stuff that's more likely to contain at least slightly thoughtful perspectives--overwhelmingly goes past second-order thinking to consider appropriate attitudes to exceptions to general patterns of rules and consequences.

So, since it seemed like the more thoughtful perspective, which is the norm for what I consume at least, wasn't represented, I thought I'd relay it here.

That is: while we don't want people to take justice into their own hands, it's on us as a society that we set up rules so badly that in this case on average everyone is quite possibly better off as a result; and maybe we should get our act together so this isn't true in the future because it shouldn't be up to individual vigilante action to make things better for people.