Miranda Devine: Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione each took different paths in life and only one can be called a hero

Both Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione were born in 1998, the year that President Bill Clinton was impeached over the Monica Lewinsky scandal and three years before 9/11.They were raised less than 250 miles apart: Penny on Long Island, and Mangione in Towson, Md., the only sons to loving families.Penny is the middle child of three sisters, and Mangione has two younger sisters.Both grew up into athletic and diligent young men.Mangione’s upbringing was more privileged than Penny’s, and he was more academically successful.

He attended a prestigious Baltimore prep school that cost his parents $40,000 a year, graduating as valedictorian before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, where his passion was for devising complex computer games to simulate his fantasies.He then worked for various tech companies including most recently as a software engineer at California online car seller TrueCar.At some point last year, he left that job and started to travel, winding up in Honolulu after backpacking through Asia.He reportedly loved Japan and spent time there earlier this year observing the culture, a bit like a professor studying ants, judging by emails that have surfaced online.“Scary lack of free will in this country,” he wrote in one email to an acquaintance, describing an incident in which he went to the rescue of a man having a seizure but was critical of the slow response of police who waited for green lights despite the urgency.“Modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal,” he wrote.Penny grew up in a less wealthy environment without the advantages that Mangione enjoyed.

He attended a public school, West Islip High, where he excelled at sports before joining the Marines, serving as a squadron leader on two overseas deployments.After four years in the military, he spent several months working at a surf shop in North Carolina near Camp Lejeune.He the...