Render & Resist

Opening Statement: The Human Cost

Brian Thompson’s killer believed he was correcting a moral wrong. He thought the system had failed, that justice demanded his gun. But his belief did not make his act just. It still remained a murder.

Brian was a husband and a father. In a shocking act of vigilante violence, someone shot him dead in front of his wife. His family’s grief was immediate and immeasurable. His employees reeled, his community staggered. The headlines captured the horror, but no headline could capture the silence at his dinner table, his absence in his children’s lives. This is the cost of vigilante justice: a life extinguished, a family shattered, a community wounded.

Instinctively, we recoil at this murder. We know that no grievance, no suspicion, no private sense of justice can justify a man taking the law into his own hands. That recoil is the beginning of wisdom. It is the recognition that justice requires law, and law requires process.

This is the danger: when individuals believe the state has abandoned morality, they often take the law into their own hands. 

Building the Case for Justice

Revenge is not the same thing as justice. Justice requires due process, not summary execution. Justice is composed of the conscientious, legally sanctioned evaluation of presented facts, alongside a measured verdict from a legitimate power. Without this, justice will inevitably descend into disarray.

• Premise 1: Law requires trial, not execution–“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury…”–The 6th amendment, The U.S. Bill of Rights

• Premise 2: Authority is legitimate only when exercised within the law. – “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”–John Locke.

• Premise 3: Vigilante violence bypasses both law and authority. – “It is not the business of a private individual to declare war.” –Thomas Aquinas. Violence without lawful authority is not justice—it is rebellion.

Therefore, killing outside the law is murder, regardless of motive. Whether by a lone gunman in a parking lot, a mob in the street, or even the state. The principle holds, Justice without law is not justice at all. In fact, when the state itself kills outside the law — as in the execution of shipwrecked survivors — it confirms that belief, fueling the very vigilantism it condemns.

The Reveal: When the State Becomes the Vigilante

Now consider the drug boats from Venezuela in international waters. Drug smugglers were intercepted at sea. Instead of being taken into custody, they were bombed without trial. Survivors of the attack, left stranded in the water, were killed by the U.S. Navy under illegal orders. Here, the state itself abandons law. What seemed like legitimate authority collapses into the same moral category as the man who killed Brian Thompson.

This is the betrayal: when the state, entrusted to uphold the law, descends into lawlessness. It teaches its citizens that justice is optional, and violence permissible. Vigilantism thrives when people believe the state has lost its moral compass. But when the state itself abandons law, it fuels the very vigilante impulse it condemns.

Parallel Cases of Vigilantism

We have seen this pattern before. 

Bernhard Goetz, the New York subway shooter of 1984, ‌shot 4 young black men for asking him for $5. Hailed by some as a hero, but legally a vigilante. 

Border militias who planned to shoot migrants outside lawful authority, claiming to defend the nation where the state has failed.

Mob lynchings throughout U.S. history, justified by communities who believed courts would not deliver “real justice.” 

Each case reveals the same erosion: when people bypass the law, authority collapses, and violence masquerades as justice.

The lesson is simple. Vigilantism is not an isolated impulse. Vigilantism is a recurring moral failure, a contagion that spreads whenever law is abandoned. And when the state itself models that abandonment, the contagion becomes epidemic.

Closing Argument: The Prophetic Challenge

Return now to Brian Thompson’s family. If we recoil at his murder, we must also recoil at the murder of shipwrecked men. If we grieve for his children, we must grieve for the children of smugglers who will never see their fathers again. Justice cannot be selective.

Authority cannot be legitimate when it kills outside the law.

Justice without law is chaos.

Authority without legitimacy is tyranny.

Every extrajudicial killing, whether by a lone gunman or by the state itself, erodes the foundation of justice. Every act of vigilante violence teaches citizens that the courts are irrelevant, that the law is optional, and that violence is permissible. That is the road to chaos and to tyranny.

The case is clear. Vigilantism is murder. State vigilantism is betrayal. And if we recoil at the murder of Brian Thompson, we must recoil at every killing outside the law. For justice without law is not justice at all.