LOS ANGELES – Immediately after a lone gunman opened fire at LAX last week, killing one and injuring at least three others, a number of celebrities who were at the airport at the time of the shooting took to Twitter to give their thoughts. Now many are complaining that their carefully thought-out observations have been ignored by the media in favor of a profanity-laced comment from actor James Franco.
“I thought I’d written Twitter gold,” complained Fox Sports personality Bill Reiter, who tweeted ‘First came the gunfire. Then people including me hiding our seats. It felt very Columbine. A new kind of fear, at least for me.’ “I mean you read that, and you get atmosphere, you get pathos, you get the Columbine reference. Do you know how hard it was to cram that all into 140 characters?”
“I was actually in the terminal when this all went down,” said actor David Anders, best known for his roles on Alias and Heroes, and tweeted ‘Was at LAX when this recent atrocity happened. Can guns go away for forever please?!?!?’ “But do I get a single interview request? Hell, no! All anyone wants to talk about is Franco’s pointless selfie. I mean Christ, how self-absorbed do you have to be to post a brooding selfie after an airport shooting?”
Other celebs on hand during the shooting who took to Twitter included Bachelor host Chris Harrison, Mythbusters stars Grant Imahara and Tory Belleci, comedian JB Smoove, Dancing With the Stars regular Lacey Schwimmer, actress Tatum O’Neal, and actor Tim Daly- who posted an image of feet. Each has since complained that their LAX Shooting tweets had not yet gone viral, with many blaming it on the media’s fascination with Franco.
“If this had happened twenty years ago, you know damn well I’d’ve been the top story,” said O’Neal. “Alright, fine. Thirty years. But it would have been all about me, not some stoned, piss-poor awards host who wasn’t even in the stupid terminal!”
Asked why he thought his tweet of ‘At #lax. Some s**tbag shot up the place’ accompanied by the moody Instagram self-portrait has hogged all the press, Franco said. “It was the moment. It was real. I was feeling it.”
Also reporting from the vicinity of LAX during the time of the shooting was Nick Jonas, who tweeted that his plane landed at LAX just after the shooting took place and that he was waiting on the plane in a remote parking area.
He assured his followers that he was safe.
