At 9:20 AM Pacific Time Friday morning, 1 Nov 2013, a man walked into Los Angeles International Airport, pulled a bunch of high powered baseball bats from his bag and began swinging them and throwing them at the crowd. He then moved through a TSA screening area and into an airport terminal, where he continued swinging and throwing baseball bats.
In all, Seven people were injured in the batting spree. One Transportation Security Administration agent was killed, the first TSA employee to be killed in the line of duty, before the suspect was taken into custody after sustaining multiple gunshot wounds to the chest. Still in the suspect's bag were over 100 additional unswung baseball bats, enough to “have literally killed everyone in that terminal today” according to LA Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Dwayne LaPeter, CEO of the National Baseball Bat Association issued a press release stating “We here at the NBBA offer our condolences to the family of the slain TSA agent. We would like to reiterate our opinion that it was the batter's Constitutional right to own as many baseball bats as he liked and people shouldn't use this tragedy to call for any bat control legislation of any kind, including regulation of high powered assault bats, because criminals like this mad batter don't listen to laws anyway. Bats don't kill people, people kill people.”
LaPeter's organization has recently filed several controversial lawsuits to be heard in the US Supreme Court, challenging the effectiveness and Constitutional conformity of laws against murder, rape and pedophilia among other crimes. The NBAA lawsuits ask the Supreme Court to find these laws unconstitutional and strike them down, contenting that such laws inhibit citizens from expressing themselves and are therefore a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech. The NBAA also claims that "these laws are a waste of law enforcement resources since it's been proven that criminals don't listen to laws anyway."
I found it rather odd that there was so little news coverage of the real event, most news outlets just barely mentioned it in passing, if at all. It's almost as if mass shootings are now so commonplace that one with a low body count is unremarkable and somehow unworthy of reporting which is a sad reflection of the mentality of America.
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