dl767captain

I was just in Washington DC and it was a pain with all the metal detectors to get into places as simple as the white house visitors center which isn't even attached to the white house. But a shopping mall and flying a few plane in to three buildings killing thousands of people are very different than a guy with a gun in a shopping mall.

doober

What about a suicide bomber in a shopping mall? What would you do then? Make everyone go through WBI and/or a grope in order to shop? Any idea what that might do to the economy?

Have you ever read John Mueller's paper "The Quixotic Quest for Invulnerability: Assessing the Costs, Benefits, and Probabilities of Homeland Security"? I suggest you do so as well as almost any one of his other books/papers:

http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/links.htm

JennyElf

Amazon and other online stores would do really well, as would postal delivery services.

dl767captain

So what, because a suicide bomber could go into a mall and kill people we should get rid of security at the airport? I'm not advocating we have TSA at all public places with more than 5 people, I'm asking what do you want the airport to become if we take away TSA and Screening machines?

Ken hAAmer

Worse than that they will claim that the stats are proof that everyone needs to go through a TSA screening before getting in their car, building anything, manufacturing anything, etc.

Scubatooth

I came from a report by the NHTSA in 2002 if you dig on the NHTSA site you should find it. The costs also comes from insurance company data

Whats not readily posted is the number of people critically injured in car wrecks each year. average person seriously injured in a car wreck (defined as a wrecks with entrapment, rollovers, ejections, or massive destruction of the frame of the body) the hospital and rehab bills from those persons ranges between $100K and a five million. the ratio of persons killed to injured is about 15-25 for every 1 person killed. so the $$$$ add up very quickly. That 8+ Billion could go a long way to making driving and roads safer.

A real bad example is last year i responded to a 12 car accident during a storm that left the roads icy. I was amazed in all the destruction there were no fatalities; we only had 1 critical the other 15 people were fine (2 ended being transported because they started complaining of neck pain). The one critical was a car had been crushed between 2 18 wheelers, and had to be cut out of the car. patient was a multi-system trauma nightmare -- bilateral femur fracture, Bilateral shattered tibia/fibula and ankles. Fractured pelvis, broken back, multiple broken ribs, tension pneumothorax, crushed cervical vertebrate and depressed skull fracture. Think jello thats what it was. It blew my mind that this person was still alive. As soon as I realized that along with the other medic that had crawled into this mangled car, we called for a helicopter as we both knew we were going to need help(airway issues as well as major bleeding) and rapid transport once the car was cut apart. Ill spare the real gory details but this person made it to a trauma center in critical condition, but alive where a trauma team went to work

This patient spent 6 months in the ICU and was only moved to rehab 2 months ago. This patient recently met with the air and ground crews that responded to the wreck. I would have never believed this was the same person from almost a year ago. person is still in a halo and needs a wheelchair but is alive. Also found out that the medical bills alone from this wreck were over 10 million, and still has a long recovery to go.

this is how injuries can go, fatalities can be just as bad or worse.

birdstrike

Pre-9/11 security would do just fine. No one is advocating removing all security from airports, just the pointless TSA security theater. Locks on cockpit doors and the shift away from giving in to hijackers demands are all that we need.

scolbath

# of deaths annually due to cigarettes: 443,000. Source: CDC.

That's about 1,200 PER DAY - or the equivalent of a 9/11 event every three days, year in and year out.

Sigh. Sometimes I despair for us as a society...

MTGriz

Exactly. I am perplexed that the TSA defenders always argue that the critics want to do away with all screening. Just take a look around. Most countries manage to screen passengers in an expedient, professional and non-intrusive manner. Not pre 9/11, TODAY! It can be done and it must be done.

dl767captain

Pre 9/11 security didn't seem to work out so well on 9/11

jplain

It didn't work because cockpit doors were not reinforced, and because passengers believed the hijackers planned to land the planes. Neither of those is true anymore. Even if they were allowed on board today, a few boxcutters would not intimidate a plane full of passengers.

wildcatlh

Repeat after me:

9/11 was not a failure of security.
9/11 was not a failure of security.
9/11 was not a failure of security.

Bonus: Nothing TSA has done in the last 9 years would have stopped 9/11 from happening. Which I'm sure you know.

barbell

Current screening methods that allow DL FAs to board flights with loaded guns also don't work so well...

MikeMpls

Pingtung

Reinforced cockpit doors and a different mindset from passengers regarding hijackers will prevent such an attack from happening again.

Any increased security we actually get from all the billions we invest is minuscule at best. I would gladly accept that additional risk in order to get back some of our civil liberties.