Originally Posted by Bart

TSA does need to improve. However, there's a delicate balance between risk management and risk avoidance.

Risk avoidance is clearly the easier of the two: if it remotely presents a potential threat, then don't let it aboard. The problem with that approach is, as pointed out previously, that items as innocent as ball point pens would have to be prohibited because they could be potentially used as weapons for gouging eyes, stabbing the carotid artery or reinforcing a jab to the solar plexis. The danger in advocating a risk avoidance approach is that you can never draw the line between a reasonable measure of security and its outrageous extreme. You can always justify increasing security. Statements, like those of Michael Boyd, tend to suggest a risk avoidance approach when he says, "we've accomplished almost nothing."