Very slippery slope, that one.
"Whatever makes us safer" is unadulterated CRAP - what makes us safer is letting everybody in NYC carry a loaded 45.
When Mayor Bloomberg is OK with me wearing a loaded 45,and carrying a 12ga, then search away.
Until then, this is just one more step towards a total nanny state.
Law enforcement presence, cooperative, thorough intelligence gathering, and community policing make us SAFER - searching people at random is BS.
Too many sheep in NYC.
I agree with this. Now how do we get that into practice and what can do we do in the meantime?
Good point. They may actually _resort to_ that before too long, after one or more suicide bombers blow themselves (and others) up in a public square. Do the same folks who so meekly consent to random searches in the subway, feel that random searches on the street will be needed, then, too?
I don't think the idea of "random searches" for the NYC subways and metropolitan-area commuter lines is going to work very well. They'll try to keep it up for a while, but like other things, what one tries to keep up must eventually come back down.
This goes _beyond_ the question of civil liberties and our rights under the Constitution (for the record, I _oppose_ such searches as an erosion of our liberties - what the heck are we supposed to be _fighting for_ anyway?). What's really may combine to make this unworkable are the issues of manpower, costs, and implementation.
My guess is that there are a _lot_ of posters in this forum who have absolutely NO idea of what the New York City subways and commuter lines are like during the rush hours. The hordes of people, crowding, pushing, teeming, just trying to get through the turnstiles.
Even the larger subway stations have relatively limited points of entry. That means that many, many - let me repeat that for emphasis, MANY - people must move through relatively constricted points of entry at a given speed in order to make the system workable. Clog up those entry points, and you have hundreds - THOUSANDS - who can't get into the system, every one of them trying to do their damnedest to get home after the workday.
Just how many riders can the NYC police actually corral, search, and release? One in a hundred? Two hundred? Three per hundred?
There are hundreds of subway stations in the system, many having two, three, or four access points. How much manpower is it going to take to secure the system? Are they going to secure every entry point, 24 hours a day? Who is going to pay for this? (HINT: it _ain't_ going to be the folks who live in New York City)
Let's consider the major transportation hubs, Grand Central and Penn Station. Penn Station has only about eight or nine entrance points through which must pass THOUSANDS of commuters, hurrying to make their trains. How are the police going to effectively cordon these areas so that they can scrutinize everyone? Impossible.
Or take Grand Central. Again, relatively few points of entry - and if you block those, you have hundreds of folks standing on the STREET, clogging up the outside of the station. Well, search them inside, right, at the gates of entry to the train platforms. Fine - but how about the commuter trying to make a train, who is hauled over to the side, searched, and misses his train? I wouldn't want to be the Metro-North official dealing with such folks.
Or consider the outlying commuter train lines, coming inbound. Dozens of stations, some in remote towns, high level platforms with multiple entry points. The only way to secure them is to limit the entry points so that everyone must walk through a cordoned gauntlet. Not likely. And the small towns which these stations serve don't have the financial resources to pay for local police to conduct searches on a 24-hour basis. Watch for an entire new "homeland transit security/TSA" bunch of goons, coming soon to a commuter station near you.
Strict security works for the airports because airplanes are _not_ "mass transit" machines; on the contrary, they carry limited numbers of riders, each of whom can be screened.
But trying to implement "security searches" on mass transit is going to be a nightmare. I predict it will either quickly be seen as:
1. Unworkable -or-
2. Unpalatable to the general public, who will demand that it be discontinued.
Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps we are destined to surrender nearly every liberty we once held dear, all in the name of "feeling" safer.
In that case, I prefer the unsafe.
Cheers!
- John