How so? A gun is a more efficient killer, but it won't open the door any more easily than a knife.

DC was hiring convicted felons for their police department. You lose.

Since you are federal and thus automatically biased against armed citizens, here is where I end. The Second Cold Civil War is about to begin, especially if Obama gets elected.

Link?

I've had two TS backgrounds done and three Secret ones completed as well as a local LEO background. If you want to think that a background done on a CCW holder is equivalent, you're a bit off. A CCW permit generally entails a NCIC check as well as local wants/warrants/arrests. That's pretty much it. No finances, no poly, nothing else. Sorry, but even local LEOs get polygraphed and have their finances investigated. At the federal level they talk to your neighbors as well. At every address you've had over the last X number of years.

Tell you what - try to not tell me what I think. You haven't a clue. I'm all for CCWs. Helped my neighbor get one, in fact, by taking him to the range and teaching him to shoot.

I'm a huge proponent of the 2nd Amendment, so please try not to build any more straw men.

They get POLYGRAPHED? Do they also do the Vulcan Mind Meld on them? Or any other fantasy techniques?

It's an open secret that the "polygraph" is no more accurate than voodoo, a non-science, promoted by charlatans. There isn't a single peer-reviewed study showing it's any better than reading animal entrails published in the 60 decades this pseudo-science has been around. Doesn't say much for law enforcement if they are actually using it.

Never said it's foolproof. Nothing is.

My point is that it's impossible to say that CCW holders are given the same level of scrutiny as LEOs.

NCIC + local/state checks = CCW
NCIC + local/state checks + fiscal records checks + polygraph + interviews with current spouse/ex-spouse/neighbors/ex-neighbors = LEO

No comparison. Again, not to say some don't slip through the cracks. They do. They always will so long as human beings are part of the process. But quantitatively there is no way the CCW list is as inclusive and thorough as the LEO one.

Substitute "broken wine bottle" or "knitting needle" or other improvised sharp/pointy item for "knife" and the scenario is equally credible.

And such murder can be effected in many ways, such as prussic acid. Training is the solution, not a stupid attempt to restrict non-credible items, especially since credible items go undetected so easily.

With no dog in the polygraph question fight (but an interest in it now that you've piqued my curiosity) I found this you might find interesting:http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?re...10420&page=107

"We used several methods to gather as many polygraph validation studies for review as possible (see Appendix G). Our search resulted in 217 research reports of 194 separate studies (some studies appeared in more than one report). The committee next determined which studies were of sufficient quality to include in our review. We agreed on six minimal criteria for further consideration:

documentation of examination procedures sufficient to allow a basic replication;

independently determined truth;

inclusion of both guilty and innocent individuals as determined by truth criteria;

sufficient information for quantitative estimation of accuracy;

polygraph scoring conducted blind to information about truth; and,

in experimental studies, appropriate assignment to experimental groups germane to estimating accuracy (mainly, guilt and innocence)."

<snip>

CONCLUSIONS

We find the general quality of research on the criterion validity of the polygraph to be relatively low. This assessment agrees with those of previous reviewers of this field. This situation partly reflects the inherent difficulties of doing high-quality research in this area, but higher quality research designs and methods of data analysis that might have been implemented have generally not been used. Laboratory studies, though important for demonstrating principles, have serious inherent limitations for generalizing to realistic situations, including the fact that the consequences associated with being judged deceptive are almost never as serious as they are in real-world settings. Field studies of polygraph validity have used research designs of no more than moderate methodological strength and are further weakened by the difficulties of independently determining truth and the possible biases introduced by the ways the research has addressed this issue."

Its many pages of reading. If you're interested, which you may not be.

And then there's this (scroll down a bit for the graph):
http://truth.boisestate.edu/amicus/brief.html

THE THEORIES UNDERLYING POLYGRAPHY AND THE COMPARISON QUESTION TESTS HAVE BEEN SUBJECTED TO SCIENTIFIC TESTING. THOSE SCIENTIFIC TESTS HAVE RESULTED IN NUMEROUS PUBLICATIONS IN PEER-REVIEWED SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS

The basic theory of the psychophysiological detection of deception and the various techniques used for the detection of deception have been put to numerous scientific tests over the past 25 years. There are many studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals that test the theory of the psychophysiological detection of deception and provide estimates of the error rates for comparison question tests. Science has approached the problem of assessing the accuracy of comparison question tests in two venues, laboratory studies and field studies.

Laboratory research has traditionally been an attractive alternative because the scientist can control the environment. Moreover, with regard to credibility assessment studies, the scientist can know with certainty who is telling the truth and who is lying by randomly assigning subjects to conditions. Laboratory research on credibility assessment has typically made subjects deceivers by having them commit a mock crime (e.g. "steal" a watch from an office), and then instructing them to lie about it during a subsequent test. From a scientific viewpoint, random assignment to conditions is highly desirable because it controls for the influence of extraneous variables that might confound the results of the experiment. (4) However, laboratory research in general, and credibility assessment in particular, can be criticized for a lack of realism. This lack of realism may limit the ability of the scientist to apply the results of the laboratory to real-world settings. (5) Some scientists who conduct research on psychophysiological credibility assessment have attempted to overcome this limitation by trying to make the laboratory simulations as realistic as possible. (6) The goal of making laboratory simulations as realistic as possible would seem to be reasonable and should provide results that have at least some applicability to field situations.

A review of the scientific literature reveals nine laboratory studies of the CQT that have attempted to simulate the field situation with specific incentives associate with the test outcome and with representative subject populations and polygraph methods. (7) The results of those realistic laboratory studies are illustrated in Table 1. The high quality laboratory studies indicate that the CQT is a very accurate discriminator of truth tellers and deceivers. Over all of the studies, the CQT correctly classified 91 percent (8) of the subjects and produced approximately equal numbers of false positive and false negative errors.



aCountermeasure Subjects Excluded

bTraditional Control Question Subjects Only

Interesting reading......

_______________

With the right caliber and placement it will. Or one can just blast thru the lav.

The TSA web site explicitly allows pliers, and of course glass is OK. So if I'm in first class, take my cocktail glass to the lav, and smash it, what can I emerge with?

If every pax had a pocket knife or box cutter, they'd be able to use it against the guy with a pair of vice grips holding a shard of sharp glass.

Possibly, but improvised weapons are inherently flawed. A broken wine bottle rarely breaks the way it's supposed to and it's structural strength doesn't last long if it does. Then there's what happens if someone just squeezes the hand.....

Murder isn't the goal, short-term. Incapacitation is. A knife incapacitates not quite as well as a gun, but pretty close. Punctures are more deadly and incapacitating than slashes (wine bottle).

I'm unfamiliar with prussic acid. Is it incapacitating in a quick manner? Can it do so in a concentrated area and yet no affect the operating team? I don't know, but that's the tools I'd want - something effective quickly that won't mess with my team and that will help keep everyone else scared and down. It's what LEOs want as well. The only difference is the ends those tools are being used to.

Good conversation Spiff......

Like I told the other poster, have you ever tried this? Really?

Or break it down and go to stabbing.

Practice makes perfect and a professional terrorists will practice. And the glasses the wine are poured in are even easier to break.

Always fighting yesterday's war.

You seriously think I cannot go to a lav with an empty wine glass, wrap it in the cloth napkin, and crunch the glass under the heal of my shoe? Grooms in some religious denominations have been doing this for years.

Quite by accident I broke a wine bottle, it was 2 buck Chuck, but none the less, it cracked in a very nice pattern which if I was so inclined, and since I am only able to use one arm, I am not, it could have been a weapon.

And glass shards from a broken wine glass can be just as deadly as a knife. Ask anyone who has ever broken a glass in a sink of dishes and reached in without paying attention? So the lav scenario could work.

I just don't think that an airplane is going to be the next weapon. Living near a large port scares me more than airports.

airline brat

It's stupid to close holes in one's defense that have been pointed out, especially in such a spectacular, effective way as 9/11. Any sport's team will exploit a hole in a defense for as long as the opponent fails to close it. It's strategy 101.

What I'm talking about it breaking a bottle and making a weapon that will hold up structurally long enough to subdue a plane. Also note that slashes are horrific but rarely fatal/incapacitating.

Improvised weapons are just that - improvised. They rarely do the damage needed and almost universally fail very quickly.