67 lines
4.6 KiB
Plaintext
67 lines
4.6 KiB
Plaintext
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Arm the Passengers
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<p>The recent controversy over arming airline pilots against a<br />
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possible repetition of the 9/11 atrocity misses a crucial problem that<br />
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makes arming pilots relatively ineffective: terrorists would know in<br />
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advance where the guns are, and be able to game against that.</p>
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<p>Let’s say you are a terrorist executing a hijacking. You know the pilots<br />
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are armed. Then here are your tactics — you send the pilots a message that<br />
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you will begin shooting cabin crew and passengers, one every five minutes,<br />
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until the pilots throw their guns into the main cabin. Just to make sure,<br />
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you split your gang into an A team and a B team. After the pilots have<br />
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thrown out some guns, you send the A team into the cockpit. If the pilots<br />
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resist, the B team kills more people.</p>
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<p>Sky marshals can be taken out in a similar way. Your B team, armed<br />
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with knives, breaks cover and announces the hijacking. The sky<br />
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marshals (if there are any present; they’re now flying on less than 1%<br />
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of planes, and can’t be trained fast enough for that figure to go up<br />
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significantly in the foreseeable future) break cover. Now your A<br />
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team, armed with guns, breaks cover and disposes of the sky marshals.<br />
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Game over.</p>
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<p>Anyone who thinks either scenario can be prevented by keeping<br />
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firearms off-board should put down that crack pipe <em>now</em>.<br />
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Tiger team exercises after 9/11 have repeatedly <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/03/25/airport.security/?related"><br />
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demonstrated</a> that the new, improved airport security has had<br />
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effectively zero impact on a determined bad-guy’s ability to sneak<br />
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weapons past checkpoints — it’s still easy. Despite government spin,<br />
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there is no prospect this will change; the underlying problem is just<br />
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too hard.</p>
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<p>For terrorists to be effectively deterred, they need to face a<br />
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conterthreat they cannot scope out in advance. That’s why the right<br />
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solution is to arm the <em>passengers</em>, not just the pilots.</p>
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<p>Now, as a terrorist, you would be facing an unknown number of guns<br />
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potentially pointed at you from all directions. Go ahead; take that<br />
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flight attendant hostage. You can’t use her to make people give up<br />
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weapons neither you nor she knows they have. You have to assume<br />
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you’re outnumbered, and you dare not turn your back on<br />
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<em>anyone</em>, because you don’t know who might be packing.</p>
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<p>The anti-gun <em>bien pensants</em> of the world wet their pants at<br />
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the thought of flying airplanes containing hundreds of armed<br />
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civilians. They would have you believe that this would be a sure<br />
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recipe for carnage on every flight, an epidemic of berserk yahoos<br />
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blowing bullet holes through innocent bystanders and the cabin walls.<br />
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When you ask why this didn’t happen before 1971 when there were no<br />
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firearms restrictions on airplanes, they evade the question.</p>
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<p>The worst realistic case from arming passengers is that some gang<br />
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of terrorist pukes tries to bust a move anyway, and innocent<br />
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bystanders get killed by stray bullets while the passengers are taking<br />
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out the terrorists. That would be bad — but, post-9/11, the major<br />
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aim of air security can no longer be saving passenger lives. Instead,<br />
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it has to be preventing the use of airplanes as weapons of mass<br />
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destruction. Thus: we should arm the passengers to save the lives of<br />
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thousands more bystanders on the ground.</p>
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<p>And, about that stray-bullet thing. Airplanes aren’t balloons.<br />
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They don’t pop when you put a round through the fuselage. A handful<br />
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of bullet holes simply cannot leak air fast enough to be dangerous;<br />
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there would be plenty of time to drop the plane into the troposphere.<br />
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To sidestep the problem, encourage air travelers to carry fragmenting<br />
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ammunition like Glaser rounds.</p>
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<p>Think of it. No more mile-long security lines, no more obnoxious<br />
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baggage searches, no more women getting groped by bored security<br />
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guards, no more police-state requirement that you show an ID before<br />
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boarding, no more flimsy plastic tableware. Simpler, safer, faster<br />
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air travel with a bullet through the head reserved for terrorists.</p>
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<p>Extending this lesson to other circumstances, like when we’re<br />
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<em>not</em> surrounded by a fuselage, is left as an exercise for<br />
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the reader…</p>
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<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=77217747">Blogspot comment</a></p>
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