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Hurrah for Patrick Smith and his good sense!
Ever since I spent a year in Israel, airport security in the U.S. has made me completely nuts. So much worry over nailfiles! So little worry over much more serious issues.
The fact that we are still not screening ALL check in luggage for explosives is a whole lot scarier than a pocket screw driver. A terrorist on board a plane, armed with a sharpened bamboo knitting needle and a good plastic knife is going to face an entire planeload of enraged passengers. We can DO something about him, especially given the reinforced cockpit door. We are helpless to do anything about the explosives in someone's checked luggage.
Some of this, I think, has to do with imagination. It is easier for us to visualize the scenario aboard American Flight 11 because it has been described and dramatized a million times. We've never had the blow-by-blow descriptions of what happens when a bomb goes off in a plane (although probably the families of the victims aboard the TWA flight have been there in their nightmares). So we think that box cutters are scarier than a stash of plastic explosives.
Take a look at any of the photos on line of bombed buses, cars, etc. from Israel and from Iraq. Imagine that that is your airplane. Now realize that we STILL don't screen to prevent that on all our domestic airline flights. Realize that while we are paying people to harrass us about nail files in line at the airport, we somehow have left our container ports with haphazard coverage. Our public transit is wide open to troublemakers. You can carry just about any crazy thing on the BART train in the SF Bay Area, just don't ask to use the bathroom (those are closed, lest a terrorist use them.)
Thanks for your good sense, Mr. Smith. May it be catching.
