Sacramento Studios, World Stage: How a Local Shooting Became the Planet’s Darkly Comic Re-run
Another Day, Another Script: The ABC10 Shooting as Global Re-run
By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific
The shots that rang out near Sacramento’s ABC10 studios on Tuesday didn’t even crack the top-three trend on Weibo; Xi’s economic “bazooka” and Messi’s ankle were busy hogging the pixels. Still, the incident—one dead, two wounded, suspect in socks—arrived right on schedule for the 2024 International Festival of American Ammo Theatre. Tickets are free, season pass included with citizenship.
Across the planet, editors performed the familiar choreography: roll B-roll of police tape fluttering like patriotic bunting, splice in a somber anchor, cut to commercial for an SUV that can ford a river of tears. In Frankfurt, the tabloid Bild sighed, “Schon wieder?”—already again—while Tokyo commuters scrolled past headlines on the Yamanote Line with the practiced indifference of people who live above a tectonic plate that could shrug them into the sea any Tuesday. The French, ever the gourmands of existential dread, noted that Sacramento’s body count was half of what Marseille calls “a calm weekend,” then returned to debating pension reform.
From an international vantage, the ABC10 shooting is less a breaking event than a recurring decimal in the American algorithm. The variables change—this time a disgruntled ex-employee, last time a disgruntled ideology, next time perhaps a disgruntled TikTok trend—but the product is reliably grim and exportable. CNN International beams it to Lagos airport lounges where passengers wonder if U.S. visas are really worth the paperwork. Meanwhile, Russian state TV packages the footage as proof that “the West is disintegrating,” neatly edited between ads for luxury bunkers in the Urals.
Global supply chains, ever efficient, feel the ripple. Australian security consultants update PowerPoints titled “Active Shooter in the Workplace: Lessons from Sacramento.” A startup in Tel Aviv pitches an AI camera that detects “aggressive gait patterns” outside newsrooms; investors in Singapore scribble term sheets. In Mexico, where American guns outnumber avocados crossing north, the story is less tragedy than logistics: another reminder that the U.S. exports more than just Netflix and obesity.
Diplomatically, the incident slots neatly into the State Department’s travel advisories, somewhere between “avoid hurricane season” and “don’t drink the tap water.” European tourists already treat the United States like an open-air safari: thrilling, but keep the windows up in Detroit. The tourism board of California—fresh off rebranding wildfires as “golden hour year-round”—now considers adding ballistic vests to welcome baskets next to the Napa Valley coupons.
Back home, the ritualized responses have achieved haiku-like brevity: Thoughts, prayers, fundraising link. A congressman from a district shaped like a Rorschach test tweets a selfie at the crime scene, flag emoji at half-staff. As of press time, GoFundMe campaigns for victims have raised $37,000, roughly the cost of replacing the station’s lobby ficus destroyed in the crossfire.
Yet the broader significance may be how utterly insignificant it is. In a world currently auctioning off glacier water and auctioning for cloud storage, a provincial shooting barely registers—unless you measure in memes. Within hours, #BulletPointBriefing trended worldwide, pairing screenshots of the ABC10 logo with captions like “When the news becomes the news.” Even the algorithm smirks.
Conclusion: Somewhere in Kyiv, a journalist dodges cruise drones to file a story on Sacramento’s latest bulletin. In Sudan, war-correspondents trade satellite bandwidth for updates on a car park gunfight 8,000 miles away. The planet shrinks, the bullets stay local, and the rest of us refresh, refresh, refresh—global citizens of the greatest show on Earth, season finale postponed indefinitely. Curtain doesn’t fall; it just reloads.
