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Notes -
Overheard at work:
Business as usual. I was also unaware of any particular crisis brewing over TSA, so I looked it up. Lo and behold: this is actually old news. Nothing has changed since DHS was pseudo-defunded a month ago.
So why am I hearing about it now? Well, a month is long enough for a missed government paycheck. Which means the TSA staff, who were apparently holding down the fort, are getting increasingly antsy. Somewhere around 300 have quit. Combined with a surprise cold front, airport security lines have been upgraded from mild to moderate inconvenience.
The usual suspects are blaming Democrats: Schiff, Booker deflect on shutdown blame amid terror concerns, thousands of DHS workers without pay. I’m still trying to figure out how this is their fault, given the Republican trifecta; Rep. Collins suggests that they are completely stonewalling any attempts at compromise. I think the last attempt was supposed to be a White House proposal from late February, but I couldn’t find the actual text of it, so I don’t know if it was at all credible. Sen. Schumer naturally insisted that it wasn’t. Perhaps we’re seeing two parties sticking to the foot-in-the-door tactic.
So, how does this type of gridlock get resolved? Do Republicans come to the table first? Do Democrats? Do airlines start privatizing security, or do they just give up on running flights?
Another option: get rid of security lines. They didn't need it in the 90s.
A lot of things were different in the 90s. Apparently, we didn’t realize hijackings could be suicidal. I wouldn’t mind replacing the TSA, but I don’t think repealing it entirely is an option.
You can’t put the toothpaste back in the 2 oz. tube.
Or we're simply more sensitive to even trivial risks. We could make planes open carry friendly, and it would be fine.
Is an open carrier executing both pilots without warning, or emptying his magazine into the wing/fuel tank, or the avionics console, or taking his gun to the rear lavatory and emptying it in the general direction of the rear elevator assembly (a not very redundant piece of plane that has a bad track record of allowing recovery when it fails), all considered a "trivial risk", or did you not consider those possibilities at all? (Too many cases of gun activist fantasies running on shounen anime rules, villains pausing to give a speech about their motivations and all.)
You have a very Hollywood or maybe video game understanding of handguns destroying machinery.
You do realise that airplanes, being optimised for low weight, are nothing like your typical machinery? Handgun bullets can likely penetrate through the aluminium exterior walls quite easily (and while the idea of explosive decompression through a bullet-sized hole is bogus, the implications of fuel leaking into the body through one in the fuel tank are plenty concerning), but more importantly, the interior side of the wall, separated from the passenger cabin by only some plastic lining, is dense with sensitive cabling and hydraulics. I recommend checking out some airplane maintenance videos for reference, or any of the numerous series of plane crash investigation media for instances of how tiny pieces of shrapnel and localised fires due to bad insulation severed some or another critical control and made the plane uncontrollable.
Don't just take it from me, either: this problem was recognised immediately when the idea of armimg any "good guys" in planes became popular.
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