National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, called Elizabeth Warren’s equivocating response to Brian Thompson’s murder “insanity.”

“The logic here — that anyone who denies you perfect access to untrammeled health care is committing an act of violence — is one that I really would not want to adopt if I, like Elizabeth Warren, were in favor of socialized medicine,” Cooke said. “Socialized medicine would transfer the next victim of an assassination from a private health insurer such as UnitedHealth to the federal government, to the director of HHS, to the president, to dare I say a senator from Massachusetts who would have voted for it.

“This is insanity,” Cooke said, elaborating that health care systems have “trade-offs because we don’t live and can never live in utopia. There is always going to be scarcity. The question is how you build a system that deals with that scarcity. The scarcity is a fact.”

Cooke said he “cannot imagine having lived through the last 15 years as a politician and thinking, ‘You know what, I think that I should sanction or justify or excuse the murder of people who make health care decisions that the public doesn’t like.’

“Number one on that list 15 years ago,” Cooke pointed out, would have been “President Barack Obama. He was the guy that was hated. He was on every poster and every protest at every town hall. He was the villain. He made decisions that led to people losing their doctor, losing the plan that they like, paying more in premiums. . . . Now, if you said to Elizabeth Warren, ‘Do you think that it would be fair to say you can only push people too far, you know?’ as an excuse for the murder of the president of the United States, she would instinctively understand why that was crazy.”

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