That’s no silver lining. Coercing a power holder to “show colors” while “being afraid” … is only a recipe for increasingly blatant use of force and corruption to maintain said power. The result is that corps and executives will hire more private security, and their lawyers and lobbyists will pay for more regulations and special treatment. Moar fear is never a win for decentralization efforts.

Correct. This was a primal act, not a civilized one. It begs for more primal acts, when we need more civilized ones. Slippery slope. This person is being celebrated by uneducated and unwise people embracing a fearful or helpless extremist perspective. Anyone who ‘knows’ is waiting for the dust to settle to figure out where this puts the conversation and how to avoid a dumpster fire with freedoms thrown into it.

The silver lining is that the US shows with this that it's not completely ruined, socially and morally. As opposed to Europe, for instance.

You think you're being intellectual, but you're just being pusillanimous.

I’m not trying to be pretentiously intellectual. Nor is my posture one of pusi (such a long word to type, is this the abbreviation?). Here’s where I’m coming from. I disagree that an assassination was an answer, if it was meant as that. And I disagree with it as a catalyst, if that is what it was to be. I would agree that freedom of speech (1A) puts us in shape as a nation, but I don’t agree that this act was evidence of that, as you indicated. The 2A puts us in shape to defend the 1A. I also believe we need an A that guarantees our freedom to transact privately. This to help protect the 1A without using the 2A. With so many citizens that don’t understand the 2A’s long term importance, acts like this killing threaten the 2A unnecessarily and put decent people at odds with each other in the debate that should not be the topic. The killer was short sighted. The killing is not going to have the effect they wanted, unless they just needed revenge. I don’t know how the landscape will shift but it isn’t likely for the better as a result of the death dealt.

You're framing this within the Constitution and the culture that derives from it, which is a good starting point, especially in contrast with Europe. But the merit and necessity of this act reside in the fact that it goes beyond the Constitutional framework, because the current reality exceeds it too. The Constitution (or rather the Bill of Rights) sets the US apart from other nations because its aim is to limit the government. It correctly identified the Government as a threat to freedom. The problem is that as of today and probably since the mid 20th century, we're way past that starting situation because we (as in "we" the West) have gone full Corporatist State regime, a.k.a. fascism. Not in the Russian propaganda sense of "fascist", but in a very literal definition of it: a mixed system in which property rights exist on paper, but only as long as private actors follow the directives of the central planners and contribute to the ideological goals that they dictate. In the specific case of the US, the health insurance financial sector is one of the cornerstones of this Corporate State, but because the Constitution did not foresee the rise of this hybrid system, and on paper its a private sector, it has carte blanche to operate and individuals and their freedoms are not protected in front of it as much as they are in front of the public sector (which isn't much to begin with anyway). So an act outside the Constitutional framework is granted and just. If you're afraid of the consequences of what is an obvious act of self defense against a tyrannical actor just because it happens to operate from behind the facade of the "private" sector of what really is just another leg of the State, then your support for the 2A as a means to protect the 1A or any other form of private property rights in front of "the government" is completely performative -- if it ever came a time when it was a "public" actor who infringed upon your rights, you wouldn't act either.

“So an act outside the Constitutional framework is granted and just.” But, not murder. I believe that this was not a just act, nor appropriate. We disagree. The extreme was unjust. And no, my view doesn’t indicate that I’d be unwilling to act if the 2A was needed. And in that case, I would not make that determination, on one man and his family, unilaterally, and just to lash out at a lopsided system in the hope to prove a sociopolitical point. I just now caught myself asking internally if my opinion changes if this, instead of one man acting alone, was an act by a group movement that is waging war on the blurred areas of a corporate state. Even then, I say that murdering a CEO, in that case and in this political climate, is not justifiable. Even if targeting political and corporate integrations that allow abuses of power. Not when there is every opportunity for the person or people to vote with their feet, vote with their dollars, and vote with their actual votes.