Originally Posted by Delta Dawn
Why do I feel safe? Because I feel like the TSA are doing their best to find weapons and bombs. Maybe they're not equipped to do their best or they have some dum-dums in their ranks, but I feel much safer with them than without them.
Yet it is still possible to down an airplane. Last Christmas the rumor was that some women were going to carry plastic explosive in their persons and down some flights. As far as I know that is still possible.
In another topic, you guys were talking about being OK with guns on flights. Are you nuts??? I've never seen so much rage in my life than in an airport and alot of times it's the airline's fault. Screeners make people mad too, but they're not the only ones ticking people off. The last thing I want is to allow the flying public to be armed at 30,000 feet.
I feel that some of the items they take are a waste of time, but I feel safe knowing that there are no guns or bombs on my plane.
How do you know that? We've already determined that screening isn't a complete guard. Neither you or I know whether there are or aren't any guns or bombs on a plane. I suspect that what we have in place is a system that prevents attacks by the least competent terrorists. The ones we should be concerned with are the ones who think these things through. Apparently, the 9/11 terrorists were in that group and it appears that Al Queada(sp?) is in that group too.
I'll tell you why I would feel safe on an airplane with guns on board. It is because arguments against them are pure emotionalism. There are cities in the US which concealed carry permits and on an emotional level you'd think "wow, people will just shoot each other left and right if they get angry" but that doesn't happen. The truth is, people in this world are capable of an incredible number of malicious acts, yet the number of malicious acts is surprisingly low. I think that there are two reasons for this: the number of truly malicious people in the world is pretty low, and people consistently under-estimate how much other people value their own skin. Consider the fact that there are steak knives in nearly every restaurant that you go into. Are people dying in aisles with knives in their backs? No. Putting suicide terrorists aside for a second, most people have more survival instinct than to wave a gun around in a plane if the penalty was life imprisonment or something nearly as severe.
On purely emotional terms it makes sense to ban many things, but when you really think about how much violence is possible in the world and how much of it never happens, you begin to realize that weapons are relatively innocuous.