LOS ANGELES — Despite a $1.6-billion investment in new security measures at Los Angeles International Airport since 9/11, Friday's shooting by a gunman who made his way deep into a passenger terminal demonstrates that the airport remains vulnerable to attacks that appear costly and difficult to defend against.
Lobbies, ticketing counters, baggage claim areas and sidewalks of the nine terminals at Los Angeles International Airport, the nation's third-busiest, are easily accessible to attackers intent on bringing firearms or bombs into the airport's public areas.
Creating a fail-safe security perimeter for the terminal area, however, would be extremely costly and might shift attacks by those seeking to do harm to other public gathering places, said Brian Jenkins, an authority on terrorism and aviation security at Rand Corp., the Santa Monica-based think tank.
"It would be very hard to do," Jenkins said. "There would be very little net security benefit. Terrorists could go somewhere else, like attack a shopping mall in Nairobi or a theater in Aurora, Colo., or Times Square. What do we really gain?"
In Friday morning's attack, a gunman identified by police as Paul Anthony Ciancia, 23, carried an assault-style rifle through the lobby of Terminal 3 and began shooting as he passed through a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint.
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