Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Nov. 6, 2013, Sacramento Bee.

The shooting at Los Angeles International Airport reveals a harsh truth.

In our free, democratic society, we have a lot of open places – airports, train stations, shopping malls, grocery stores, post offices, schools and parks – where large numbers of people gather.

We cannot make them 100 percent safe.

Anyone can walk into any of these open public places with anything in a bag – as U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte Jr. said the LAX suspect did with an M&P15 semi-automatic tactical rifle (which is Smith and Wesson’s version of the AR-15 rifle), five 30-round magazines and hundreds more rounds in boxes. At airports, bags don’t get screened until the security checkpoint.

One thing we should not do is to seize upon this one incident – which resulted in the death of a TSA employee, the first killing in the 12-year history of the Transportation Security Administration – to arm TSA screeners.

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