Increasing security is fine in the short-term, but long-term it's just like gun control. You prevent any honest person from defending themselves, while the dishonest ones continue to find ways around any regulations in place. Forcing everyone on a plane to carry a knife would be a better measure than not allowing anyone to do so.
First, the events of Tuesday were not typical hijacking's. They were suicides. Secondly, the best deterent to hijackings in general (which we have very, very few of) would be to have SECURITY PERSONEL on each flight in combination with tight physical security at the airports.
In this case, one person with a gun or a tazer on each of these flights would have prevented any of these planes from being taken over. However, the federal government in it's infinite wisdom could not find the money out of a 2 trillion dollar budget to provide security to more than a handful of flights, nor could it see the clues that pointed to this type on incident taking place.
Let's face it, the federal government is incompetent in just about everything that it does and is indirectly responsible for these events.
---max
How can you say this? Did this deter the b@st@rds the committed Tuesday's atrocity? Of course not. They couldn't care less about "eluding authorities" They planned on suicide along with mass murder.
For that matter it doesn't deter a lot of ordinary street crime. Most criminals have a long record. This implies that they have failed to elude authorities repeatedly. This never seems to do much in the way of deterence.