Arm the Passengers
<p>The recent controversy over arming airline pilots against a<br />
possible repetition of the 9/11 atrocity misses a crucial problem that<br />
makes arming pilots relatively ineffective: terrorists would know in<br />
advance where the guns are, and be able to game against that.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s say you are a terrorist executing a hijacking.  You know the pilots<br />
are armed.  Then here are your tactics &#8212; you send the pilots a message that<br />
you will begin shooting cabin crew and passengers, one every five minutes,<br />
until the pilots throw their guns into the main cabin.  Just to make sure,<br />
you split your gang into an A team and a B team.  After the pilots have<br />
thrown out some guns, you send the A team into the cockpit.  If the pilots<br />
resist, the B team kills more people.</p>
<p>Sky marshals can be taken out in a similar way.  Your B team, armed<br />
with knives, breaks cover and announces the hijacking. The sky<br />
marshals (if there are any present; they&#8217;re now flying on less than 1%<br />
of planes, and can&#8217;t be trained fast enough for that figure to go up<br />
significantly in the foreseeable future) break cover.  Now your A<br />
team, armed with guns, breaks cover and disposes of the sky marshals.<br />
Game over.</p>
<p>Anyone who thinks either scenario can be prevented by keeping<br />
firearms off-board should put down that crack pipe <em>now</em>.<br />
Tiger team exercises after 9/11 have repeatedly <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/03/25/airport.security/?related"><br />
demonstrated</a> that the new, improved airport security has had<br />
effectively zero impact on a determined bad-guy&#8217;s ability to sneak<br />
weapons past checkpoints &#8212; it&#8217;s still easy.  Despite government spin,<br />
there is no prospect this will change; the underlying problem is just<br />
too hard.</p>
<p>For terrorists to be effectively deterred, they need to face a<br />
conterthreat they cannot scope out in advance.  That&#8217;s why the right<br />
solution is to arm the <em>passengers</em>, not just the pilots.</p>
<p>Now, as a terrorist, you would be facing an unknown number of guns<br />
potentially pointed at you from all directions.  Go ahead; take that<br />
flight attendant hostage.  You can&#8217;t use her to make people give up<br />
weapons neither you nor she knows they have.  You have to assume<br />
you&#8217;re outnumbered, and you dare not turn your back on<br />
<em>anyone</em>, because you don&#8217;t know who might be packing.</p>
<p>The anti-gun <em>bien pensants</em> of the world wet their pants at<br />
the thought of flying airplanes containing hundreds of armed<br />
civilians.  They would have you believe that this would be a sure<br />
recipe for carnage on every flight, an epidemic of berserk yahoos<br />
blowing bullet holes through innocent bystanders and the cabin walls.<br />
When you ask why this didn&#8217;t happen before 1971 when there were no<br />
firearms restrictions on airplanes, they evade the question.</p>
<p>The worst realistic case from arming passengers is that some gang<br />
of terrorist pukes tries to bust a move anyway, and innocent<br />
bystanders get killed by stray bullets while the passengers are taking<br />
out the terrorists.  That would be bad &#8212; but, post-9/11, the major<br />
aim of air security can no longer be saving passenger lives.  Instead,<br />
it has to be preventing the use of airplanes as weapons of mass<br />
destruction.  Thus: we should arm the passengers to save the lives of<br />
thousands more bystanders on the ground.</p>
<p>And, about that stray-bullet thing.  Airplanes aren&#8217;t balloons.<br />
They don&#8217;t pop when you put a round through the fuselage.  A handful<br />
of bullet holes simply cannot leak air fast enough to be dangerous;<br />
there would be plenty of time to drop the plane into the troposphere.<br />
To sidestep the problem, encourage air travelers to carry fragmenting<br />
ammunition like Glaser rounds.</p>
<p>Think of it.  No more mile-long security lines, no more obnoxious<br />
baggage searches, no more women getting groped by bored security<br />
guards, no more police-state requirement that you show an ID before<br />
boarding, no more flimsy plastic tableware.  Simpler, safer, faster<br />
air travel with a bullet through the head reserved for terrorists.</p>
<p>Extending this lesson to other circumstances, like when we&#8217;re<br />
<em>not</em> surrounded by a fuselage, is left as an exercise for<br />
the reader&#8230;</p>
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