I'm all for having a gun and protecting myself(God knows in a few years we'll all have to defend ourselves in our own neighborhoods).In the NY subway situation a gun is useless.A guy is going to come in with a back pack and blow it .The police need to be able to search anyone and profile Middle Eastern men PERIOD..What are you going to do with your gun stand thete all day and stop people? In this situation the cops needs the right to do whats necessary and any conservative with half a brain knows that the best solution. I WANT people searched.it's not a nanny state situation ,it's a COMMON SENSE situation.
I look at it this way: my chances of being on a train or a plane with a bomb-carrying sand-[n-word] are a hell of a lot less than my chances of being on said train or plane with a domestic, garden-variety gun- or knife-toting crazy.
It's nice that they're trying to protect people from the aforementioned bomb-carriers, but if they're not allowed to profile people and must resort to random or timed or 100% searches then it's ALSO nice that, as a by-product, they'll be noticing whatever ELSE the miscreants are carrying which could conceivably hurt ME.
Liberal or conservative, everybody's got the same initial reaction whether or not they're willing to admit it: I'm paying taxes for the government to protect ME and MINE first; and if they can protect everyone else too then that's so much the better.
BTW: you said "guns". I said "armed" - which could mean 'guns', or a lot more.