I completely agree with your comments about the war on terror. This case can be compared with the tragic shooting by police of the young man on the London tube a while back. The London police revealed that they had been carefully trained in Israeli techniques on how to kill someone carrying a bomb. I venture to guess that something similar is true in this case. Planning for terrorism brings out this rigid military mentality in people. Nobody seems to have been trained to deal with the possibility that maybe the suspect doesn't have a bomb. And what was completely bizarre is that even afterward, when it was clear that the poor fellow was delusional but harmless, authorities were saying that it was correct to shoot him! What is this world coming to?

"...a guy running around an airplane screaming incoherently and reaching for something in a bag is *exactly* the type of threat that at least I believe we should be responding to...."

A few questions:

Is a guy running and screaming incoherently, snatching at his bag, a clear threat, or a clear indication of someone suffering a mental breakdown?

Which, if any, of the 9/11 hijackers ran screaming and gesticulating?

Did they not in fact climb aboard quietly, trying not to draw attention to themselves?

If the disturbed gentleman had been blonde-haired and blue-eyed...would he have been Timothy McVeigh?

Remember the shoe bomber? He was a real threat. And he was clearly mentally ill. One could argue most suicide bombers will be.

So I feel very good that there are armed undercover officers on airplanes now. This is a big improvement over relying on flight attendants and passengers for defense.

In Israel, suicide bombers are a big threat, and armed guards are a big part of the solution. They act pre-emptively. They have to. That's what these air marshals did.

Q. Is there anybody who would rather NOT have armed guards on airplanes? Would you rather just fend for yourselves again?

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.

As my boyfriend is Indian, we've long since noticed how brown skin, a foreign surname and a hint of a beard set off mental alarms. One of the last times he flew, his identification was checked against his ticket on five separate occasions.

A few days after the London bombings, we were facing the encroachment of roaches into his Atlanta apartment. One night, we discussed having him set off a roach bomb and spending the day elsewhere.

The next morning, as he dropped me off at the train station so I could go to work, I leaned back into the car and said cheerfully, "Don't forget to bomb today!"

I walked away, and about thirty seconds later, realized what I had just said to him and started looking frantically around, but no cops were rushing the car. Later that day, I joked uneasily about the incident with coworkers.

Reading the story of Alpizar (and before that, Menezes) makes me not just uneasy, but scared. For my boyfriend, and his family, and just about anyone with brown skin and possibility of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If this is winning the war on terrorism, then what's losing?

Whether some people want to admit it or not, running around screaming and gesticulating wildly while clutching a bag on an airplane is an intimidating, aggressive act. To ask anyone, even a trained air marshall, to not find this exceptionally alarming, dangerous, and "a clear threat" is unreasonable. Because the 9/11 hijackers didn't call attention to themselves, are we to view more extreme outward behavior as not hijacker-ish enough to warrant a potentially lethal response?

While it is unfortunate that this incident ended in such tragedy and the question of whether lethal force was appropriate remains open, we can't dismiss the fact that there will often be dire consequences when you behave like a raging nut and scare the hell out of people on an airplane.

Speaking as a diagnosed bipolar patient (rapid cycling with severe psychotic features when untreated), this guy was in dire straits before he boarded the plane. It was obvious not only to his wife but to surrounding witnesses that he was highly agitated, appeared delusional, and was singing spirituals. He was psychotic while he was boarding.

While I agree that deadly force may not have been necessary, the truth is that Alpizar and his wife are partially responsible for the situation. Let me explain.

Bipolar disorder is not about "moodswings". It is a deadly serious brain disorder. Everyone who has been correctly diagnosed as bipolar has had at least one severe manic episode - you cannot receive a diagnosis without a manic episode, and more often than not, a manic episode has psychotic features. It seems to me that Alpizar has three strikes against him: he had a definitive diagnosis of bipolar disorder; he was off his medicine; and his wife didn't get him straight to a hospital.

If he was diabetic, you can be sure he'd have had his insulin on hand. If he was prone to cardiac events or even high blood pressure, it's likely he'd either be on continuous medication or else in the hospital. It is finally the patient's own responsibility to take charge of his or her own treatment, and the second line of defense lies with family members who understand the illness.

This case speaks to me less about the state of airline security and much more about the state of mental health care and awareness in this country. Far too many bipolars have the mistaken belief that their illness is minor. A subset of those believe that their illness is "cured" once they are stabilized on the correct medications. The truth is that bipolar disorder is incurable; only the symptoms can be ameliorated. Fully fifty percent of diagnosed bipolars are non-compliant with their medication regimen, and that is an unacceptable number.

It's a terribly vicious cycle. Bipolar patient gets put on good medicine - bipolar patient feels cured - bipolar patient goes off meds - bipolar patient slowly succumbs to an inevitable relapse, which causes a profound erosion of insight and judgement. A psychotic person generally isn't capable of reasoned, rational response. A rational response for someone with a heart problem would be, "Oops, I just had a major palpitation; I should get that looked at or get back on my medicine as soon as I can." But someone who has slipped into severe mania or psychosis doesn't have that ability. They lose their mental capacity to understand the severity of their own mental state.

It was obvious that his wife knew how sick he was. Even if there had been some unlikely extenuating circumstance that had prevented her husband from taking his meds, the responsibility was on her to either get him to a hospital for immediate treatment or at least to tell flight personnel about her husband's mental state. Ideally, he never should have flown at all in his delusional state.

It makes me very angry that so few people take this illness seriously. I can't tell you the number of times people have downplayed my own struggle with bipolar disorder with the refrain of "just snap out of it" or something equally dismissive. The truth is that most untreated bipolars only wind up hurting themselves; the suicide rate for those that refuse medication is outrageously high. (Just try to find an insurance company that will admit a pre-exisiting bipolar diagnosis.) For that reason, bipolar disorder has a mortality rate higher than most forms of cancer. But psychosis is tricky, and psychotic people do sometimes hurt other people, most often their own children or beloved family members. And yet it is still treated as a simple annoyance or minor impediment by most health care providers and most patients.

The real story here is yet another tragic instance of severe, debilitating mental illness being treated as a head cold.