I first learned of the shooting at Terminal 7 of the Los Angeles Airport when I checked in to see what Charles P. Pierce was blogging about today. (correction: Pierce was in Terminal 7, but the shooting was in Terminal 3. I didn't know where the shooting was when I first posted this, other than at LAX.) Turns out Pierce had gotten off a plane at LAX and was walking around the terminal when he saw CNN on the omnipresent TV screens with the crawl, "POLICE: SHOTS FIRED AT LAX." And that was about all he could find out, for a while at least.
Several posts later, the situation is finally starting to unwind a bit. The shooter is reportedly alive and in custody, so his motive may not remain a mystery in this case at least.
There will be a lot of useless blathering tonight and maybe tomorrow on the media about the shooting and what it means, and what could be done, or could have been done. None of it matters. Pierce comes right to the point:
...There already is some talk about this event being a "random" one. But it is not. These things are becoming as regular as rain, as predictable as the summer heat. The only thing "random" about it is the shooter. He could be anyone, and that's the point. There are people who spend money making sure that he could be anyone, and there's nothing "random" about how they do that….
The NRA will make predictable noises; the gun worshippers will talk about freedom and their rights; politicians will be careful to say the right things without ever admitting that there is anything they might personally do to change this bargain we've apparently made. Pierce spells it out explicitly, this price we've consented to in how we order our affairs as a nation:
...I am leaving behind what America has determined must happen from time to time, if we are to be a free people. I am leaving behind what America has determined is part of the cost of being an American. I am leaving behind the blood that I am told I must accept as part of the price of being a member of a free society. I am leaving behind a place of death, and I am joining my fellow citizens, as we make an odd pilgrimage out of a place that is now another altar of the blood sacrifice that I am told we must make, regularly, in order to be truly free….
Read the whole thing.