Suicidal 23-Year-Old NJ Guy Who Hated ‘Pigs’ Reported as #LAX Shooter

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Multiple sources have confirmed Paul Ciancia, 23, of Pennsville, New Jersey, has been identified as the gunman in the shooting at Los Angeles International Airport. Pete Williams of NBC News characterized Ciancia as motivated by “strong anti-government views” and a lot of us who have seen this media pattern for years just rolled our eyes.

Subsequent reports indicate the young gunman was suicidal, and left a note referring to police as “pigs.” We’ll see. Patience.

UPDATE: From NBC’s Philadelphia affiliate:

Paul Ciancia, 23, grew up in Pennsville, Salem County, N.J., according to Pennsville’s Police Chief. He’s been living in Los Angeles recently, but authorities are not sure for how long. . . .
Police say the shooter’s brother got a text message from Ciancia on Friday saying he was thinking about taking his life.
The brother contacted Pennsville Police and around 1 p.m. Pennsville’s police chief called Los Angeles Police to do a well-being check on Ciancia, police said.
Los Angeles Police went to Ciancia’s apartment. The man wasn’t there, but his roommates told police everything was fine, authorities said.

UPDATE II: More than two hours after the last update here, and the stream of information has slowed to a trickle. The latest Associated Press account has the fact that the shooter’s father owns an auto body shop in New Jersey. Hours have passed since Pete Williams of NBC reported that Ciancia had “strong anti-government views.” This characterization evidently came from an FBI spokeswoman named Lourdes Arocho. But reports compiled at The Daily Mail don’t indicate any real political motive.

This seems to have been just another quiet weird kid who flipped out on a suicide-by-cop trip — except he wasn’t killed.

He was shot several times, but survived. The general media silence about the gunman’s motive suggests to me that Ciancia’s reported “anti-government views” were, basically, just crazy-talk.

 

59 comments

  1. “Pig”, as a pejorative applied to law enforcement, was coined by hippies back in the day when being a hippie was frowned upon.

    Just sayin’ is all.

  3. He’s mentally ill. That much is plain. Why he wasn’t green-warranted I don’t know, he was suicidal AND homicidal. His mother died just a few years ago, he’s just barely an adult and the right age for seriously life-disrupting mental illness to manifest.

  4. Maybe he just found out what his Obamacare premiums would be. That should be enough to set someone off….

  9. But… but.. didn’t Sarah Palin draw a crosshairs on a picture of a cop once? I like so TOTALLY heard that somewhere…I think it was MSNBC or someplace authoritative like that…

  12. The reason they dropped the “anti-government” crap was because he is probably going to make it. Basically you can’t make stuff up with a witness, in this case the only witness that counts.

  14. My uncle has been institutionalized for the better part of 40 years. He NEEDS to be there–otherwise he’d have killed someone or been a victim himself. He’s in his 70s now, which is ancient for a schizophrenic.

  18. So Jay Rockefeller (how many cousins married to create this guy?) twits out that: “While some in Congress believe that privatizing our aviation security workforce would be preferable, these brave men and women are proving
    that the federal TSA agents are highly capable and ready to protect passengers every step of the way.”

    Uh, moron, the shooter got past TSA … LAPD stopped him.

  19. You are absolutely correct, but being bat guano crazy isn’t considered an ailment these days. You almost have to do something erratic AND violent to get the attention of law enforcement to even get a mandatory mental health evaluation.

    The man who killed five people and himself in South Carolina this week is an example. He had at least two incidents which should have raised mental health concerns, and a long criminal record including violence, yet was out on bond awaiting what was likely to be a long prison sentence and never evaluated.

    The old system of just locking people with mental issues away was not sound, but neither is the modern approach of ignoring the problem until someone is killed.

  20. The reason there is ALWAYS some initial report of these shooters being “right-wing,” “anti-government,” “Tea Party,” or otherwise described as disgruntled conservatives is that there is never any consequence for getting it wrong.

    What happened to any of those who falsely ascribed conservative-related politics to Loughner in AZ, the Aurora shooter, the school shooter in Connecticut, or the Navy yard shooter, for example? Not one suffered any real career or personal consequences. Only Brian Ross of ABC was even publicly embarrassed by it, but he wasn’t fired, suspended, or demoted for it.

    As long as they can walk away from their false accusations without paying any price, they will continue to let them fly.

  22. Off topic, but does anyone know why it’s called a ‘green’ warrant, as opposed to some other color? Printed on green paper? Just curious….

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