Posted on 09/14/2001 9:10:28 AM PDT by no-s
Airport Insecurity? And Why Manhood Cures Terrorism
By Duncan Maxwell Anderson
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 14, 2001
THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11 tell us that we are not in a crisis of security measures, but of manhood. It appears that the pirates who commandeered the aircraft of the most high-tech civilization in history, subjugating passengers and crew who outnumbered them 20 to 1, were armed only with knives.
There were heroic moments nevertheless. A handful of passengers on one of the four planes, United Flight 93, apparently rushed the hijackers and made them miss their target as the plane went down. No doubt other acts of heroism and self-sacrifice occurred on that and other flights, which we may not learn about in this life. But Flight 93 raises the question of whether swift action by passengers at the first sign of trouble might have entirely prevented all four hijackings. Why didn?t it?
Thwarting the crimes would have required the presence of a number of daring, independent-minded men on each plane who were willing to violate the taboos of our polite, white-collar society.
I heard John Lawless, public safety director for Logan Airport, explaining the Sisyphean program by which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) hopes to make flying in Boston safe. It includes banning all knives, including plastic ones, from the secure areas of the airport, even at food concessions. That seems likely to make airports more vulnerable, rather than less. Everyone in the perimeter will be sufficiently disarmed that all it will take to hijack a plane is a case of bad breath.
One might reply that Logan?s security guards (who henceforth will be state policemen) will have weapons. Or that an armed Sky Marshal will be aboard each plane. But consider that guns can be swiped from holsters. In an airport or plane sterilized of all other weaponry, a terrorist with an officer?s Glock becomes the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind - facing a populace armed with plastic spoons.
I hesitate to say that the logical conclusion is to force all passengers to board planes naked and unconscious, because someone might take me seriously.
People in the public safety business seem to have 19th-century ideas in a world of 21st-century transportation. They have only one solution to any problem: trying to control it from the top down, keeping ordinary citizens as helpless as possible, lest they cause more problems.
In the interest of creating a safer and easier society, we in the West have passed laws designed to keep weapons out of the hands of disorderly persons. What the laws effectively do is keep weapons out of the hands of most persons. And that can work well-in a controlled environment. But we are in a mobile society with a flight system open to the entire world. No police force or army can protect people who have emasculated themselves of all weapons. Order cannot survive where men in particular have given up the idea that it is right and good that they be equipped to stand up for themselves and protect the innocent.
Rather than seeking the diminishing returns of intensified control over the innocent, surely it would be simpler and safer to use the leverage of freedom to intimidate the guilty:
Allow any airline passenger to carry any sidearm of his choosing-concealed or unconcealed.
Anyone who tried to commandeer a plane would find himself surrounded by hostile fire, and enjoy a short career. There might be a risk of injury or death to some innocent passengers from stray shots or cabin punctures. But isn?t that a better risk than that of losing all 300 passengers and thousands of other innocents on the ground?
But it?s more likely that there would be no in-air firefights at all. If the FAA solemnly announced that passengers were free to carry private firearms, that would end discussion of the plane-hijack option among terrorists, whose greatest fear is to die in humiliating failure.
Some terrorists would try to think of other approaches to terror, of course. But the spell would be broken. For a small band of lunatics to hold a huge crowd helpless and sear the psyche of the civilized world, the crowd must be unarmed. The whole warped project of the terrorist - using a small piece of technology to make large numbers of people sit still for ideas they would otherwise laugh at - cannot survive the democracy of force.
I doubt the FAA will change its mind tomorrow. The institutions of Western culture long ago adopted feminism-a philosophy that holds that the leadership and physical strength of ordinary men are dangerous, unnecessary, and possibly evil. But feminism is built on a contradiction. For women and children - including feminists - to survive without male leadership and protection, they must be kept in a protected world where unseen male policemen or soldiers keep the bad men far away. That world is now gone.
Even now, our culture could be in the process of reclaiming its true sense of purpose to defeat its terrorist enemies. Perhaps Jeremy Glick will be an example for other men. A passenger on Flight 93, Glick called his wife on his cell phone to tell her that he and some others were about to jump the hijackers - and he told her to have a good life and raise their three-month-old daughter well. Because of these men?s heroics, Flight 93 crashed in a field south of Pittsburgh, instead of destroying the White House.
There will be no more hijackings when American men decide that they will defend their families and their neighbors from barbarians, risking their lives if necessary. Perhaps next week, men inspired by recent events will start practicing at shooting ranges. Others may take up (or re-learn) boxing or wrestling, or the Oriental martial arts - which were invented by peasants denied the use of weapons by their overlords. But rather than the specifics, it is the change in our attitude from passivity to mastery that will change our culture and our destiny.
Right now, civilized people wonder where the next disruption to their lives will occur. When they quietly arm themselves, it will be the terrorists - the diminishing number who will be attracted to that trade - who will be moving nervously from place to place, wondering which face in the crowd, which stockbroker, which accountant, which shopkeeper, which schoolteacher, will make their dreams of domination evaporate in an instant.
Duncan Maxwell Anderson is editorial director of Faith and Family. E-mail him at dmaxanderson@hotmail.com.
They banned plastic knives from all areas of the airport. I wouldn't set foot in a sheep pen like that.
Excellent idea. Where do I sign up? ?
I recall reading that, in the beginning of WW2, armed civilians rode the railroads as a deterrent to saboteurs. If memory serves, this was done in Canada as well. And the British had a much more extensive home guard than anyone in North America (armed with donated American guns, but let it go for now.)
Looks like we need to do it again.
And putting your hand over a bullet hole probably wouldn't be much different than putting it over the hose of a good vacuum cleaner.
This is not my area of expertise, but, of course, I have an opinion.
When you blow up a toy balloon, the pressure inside is only barely more than the pressure outside. The difference in pressure forces the elastic material to stretch until the forces are balanced.
The skin of an airplane is similar to a balloon, but is on a frame so that there is a pre-determined shape when the pressure is equalized by opening the doors. Also, the material requires great force to stretch it, so it doesn't expand very much at altitude.
At cruising altitude, the small pressure difference creates tension in the skin of the plane, but the shape is constrained by the airframe.
Now imagine what happens when you stick a pin in a toy balloon. The tension which existed in the stretched material is disturbed and the material begins to tear. The balloon "pops" because the tearing is very quick and the pressure is allowed to equalize very quickly.
If a bullet passes through the skin of an airplane, the tension in the skin of the airplane is disturbed and it is possible (perhaps likely) that the skin will begin to tear. The change in forces is so rapid, that substantial damage can be done to the skin before the pressures inside and outside the airplane are equalized.
The solution to the problem of catastrophic damage caused by a bullet hole in the skin of an airplane is to design the framework to which the skin is attached, or possibly the shape of the skin itself, so that the tearing which takes place after a hole is made is limited during the decompression. Everyone would have to reach for an oxygen mask at cruising altitude, and perhaps one or two people might find themselves outside the plane. (Note: don't let your hamster play near an operating vacuum cleaner!)
The details and cost of making the skin of an airplane "bullet-proof" in this fashion is complicated enough that I am still working on an opinion.
The important point is that there are things which might be done to allow passengers to protect themselves. Making them defenseless is proven to cost thousands of lives.
I do agree however with letting people go through the Sky Marshall training and investigations (if you can be a sky marshall, pass through their training, etc). Let volunteer citizens be "deputized" for every flight.
If we don't trust politicians or used car salesmen, why would we trust a criminal?
Contemplate also the UA 747 that had a major chunk of its side ripped off leaving Hawaii back around 1989 due to a bad latch on a cargo door (I'm not referring to the 737 that developed a sun-roof).
Several passengers were sucked out because their seats were ripped from the floor, but overall the aircraft returned to Hawaii and landed safely.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.