Posted on 10/15/2001 3:11:51 PM PDT by RichardEdward
Following the dreadful morning when four American commercial airliners were used to murder thousands of people in the span of a couple of hours, there has been much discussion of arming pilots. Many people are also saying that even properly trained citizens should be allowed to carry firearms on planes, as well.
To facilitate the discussions about whether or not to allow guns onto airplanes and who should or should not be allowed to carry them, we need to dispense with at least 12 Myths under which some people appear to be baffled. It's also a good idea to proceed in this conversation based on facts, reason and logic -- setting aside anything else, especially emotional or illogical dismissal of the facts.
We must also assume that anyone who cannot refute the facts reasonably must be unable to do so because the facts stand up under scrutiny -- and dismiss their emotional and illogical assertions as irrelevant.
MYTH #1 Cabin depressurization will occur if a firearm is discharged on an airplane
MYTH #2 A citizen or a pilot with a firearm on an airplane might shoot innocent people
MYTH #3 If you arm pilots with guns, problems could occur.
MYTH #4 A citizen using a gun on a plane might kill an innocent person
MYTH #5 Carrying a firearm on a plane is too much responsibility to give to a citizen
MYTH #6 Pilots and citizens are not competent enough to handle a firearm on a plane
MYTH #7 If you take a firearm onto an airplane, a hijacker could take your gun from you
MYTH #8 An armed pilot or armed citizens are no match for crazed, suicidal terrorists.
MYTH #9 No amount of training could justify giving a pilot or passengers the right to carry a firearm aboard an airplane.
MYTH #10 A pilot or citizens having guns on airplanes is not safe
MYTH #11 A lot of innocent people could get hurt or killed if we allow properly trained pilots and/or passengers to carry guns on airplanes.
MYTH #12 "We don't want the plane to depressurize at 30,000-feet because someone thinks they saw a hijacker." -- Representative Greg Walden
What if a round was to exit the fuselage, or maybe even take a chunk of metal off of the fuselage and further damage the plane. (like hit the intake side of an engine or throw some metal into it??) What about damage to electrical and/or hydraulic systems? What about some of the "disco era" planes we have in service? Are they strong enough to deal with these issues, metal fatigue and all?? Can you show me that bullets could do no more damage to a plane than a thumb size hole, every time? What about a nice tight group of 9 rounds fired in the same spot? Still nothing to worry about? There are types of ammo that can be used on plane to minimize these concerns, but how do you make sure everyone is using this ammo?
Look, I am a gun owner, and I have nothing against personal carry weapons. Quite the contrary. But you are asking me, as a passenger, to trust that this legal gun owner, packing a .50 Desert Eagle, is mentally competent to be on the plane traveling 500 Miles an hour at 35,000 feet. We don't do psych profiles on CCW tests. Are you prepared to trust everyone?
An ex-friend of mine in Oregon has a clean record, doesn’t drink, or do drugs, and it scares the hell out of me to know this guy can carry a gun legally. He thinks he’s in the old west or something. I’ve seen the guy pull it because someone looked at him wrong. Sound fun at 30,000 feet? I totally respect his right to carry the gun, but that doesn’t mean I feel safe around him. For that matter, I won’t even go shooting with people I don’t know or trust. If I see some moron waving his piece around on the range, I leave.
There are too many drunks, druggies, mentally unstable, “pissed off at the world”, etc in this world. Give them this much power and you have a quite a few dangerous possibilities.
Look at these terrorists. These people were our neighbors, doctors, flight students, etc. Would we have looked at them twice, under our “Personal Airplane Carry” (my title) law? Probably not. Even if you were to have a special “Citizen Air Militia” (my title) gun permit or something, these guys would have likely just gone and got one, passing without a hitch. Remember, these guys WANT to die. They are headed for paradise or whatever. Are we going to discriminate and disallowd Middle Eastern born Americans from carrying on planes?
I can say pretty surely that I don’t want to be inside of a huge flying Tylenol with bullets hurling around inside of it- on the ground, or in the air.
Some of the Myths in the original posts are not Myths at all, they are REAL possibilities.
You spent a lot of time and energy telling us what you would not like to see.
Is the bottom line that you'd rather take your chances with armed terrorists and everyone else unarmed?
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel091401.shtml
Making the Air Safe for Terror:Turning airplanes into safe zones for hijackers. by dave kopel and David Petteys
The conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense!
maybe we should ban all airline passengers from carrying on ANYTHING.. including clothing.. heck we could even require full body cavity searches before boarding.. what say you?
From the utilitarian standpoint, one has to answer two questions if you are going to allow passengers to defend themselves on board. The first is who will be allowed effective self defense, and the second is what weapons will be allowed?
The problem can be simplified if we take firearms out of the equation for the moment. Let's use edged weapons as an example, since no one is alleging that a knife could depressurize the cabin, under any circumstances. And, an edged weapon is a terribly effective defenive tool -- so effective, in fact that the only safe defense against it is a firearm used outside of the attacker's reach. But I digress.
Let's consider question 1 for a moment: who is to be permitted the means of defending himself? Well, following the previous poster's line of reasoning, the person's mental equilibrium should be assessed. Also, any temporary imparement (emotional, or chemical, or otherwise) needs to be factored in. Also, the skill level of the defender would want to be assessed, so that an innocent bystander is not injured by the defender. (Let's assume that one is free to disregard one's own safety in meeting an in-air attack. In fact, at the moment, we're forced to.)
This is not an overly daunting task. There are literally thousands of LE agencies in this country that undertake psychological screening of potential personell, offering a model for either private enterprise (my choice) or the federal government to pre-qualify potential armed citizens. (remember, we're not talking about guns, here.) With regard to the technical skill required, this is much more demanding for edged weapons than firearms, but again, training in the used and defense against edged weapons is available in every American city large enough to support a karate studio. So, off the top of one's head, there could be a two-tier process: pass the psych. profile (and citizenship requirements), then get certified as technically competent with the weapon. So, still opposed? If so, you can't really be worried about depressurizing the plane, you must be worried about something else. What is it? That your fellow citizens would go berzerk and start hurting people? Remember, there are a dozen or so other trained people are on board too. Worried about the safety of the "defender", well, me too. Edged weapons favor the young, the fit, and the highly (I mean every day) trained. So let's move on to point 2) what weapons would be allowed?
We've talked about edged weapons above, and I've touched on some of the problems there. What about handguns? It is true that frangible rounds are available that pretty much won't go past their target (as long as you hit it), but those will still perforate the cabin wall of an airliner. Don't beleive me, go check the ballistics. Also, some manufacturers of self-defense ammunition are a bit twitchy about .45 caliber rounds stopping in the target. So, we will probably want to restrict the caliber of the gun, and the type of ammunition. How do you do this? It's much tougher to allow only some items past a cordon that to restrict all of them, but it's not impossible. The notion of issuing ammunition and matching guns to pre-screened passengers is worth looking at carefully. So is the notion that the hand baggage and firearms could be screened, perhaps in a separate area, by a group of trained guards. The permit holders would also be strongly incentivized to screen themselves.
This is getting a bit long, but it strikes me that the argumetn against allowing at least some passengers to carry, is rooted in the false notion that the alternative is presumptively safe . On the contrary, I would argue that the present policy is both insanely dangerous, and has proven to be catastrophically wrong, on more than one occasion. Now, we are faced with the fact that our own government has simultaneously told us that the air force is authorized to shoot down cililian airliners that are deemed to pose a threat to ground-based buildings or other targets, while we are denied the means of effective self-defense in the air. This is stupid as a practical matter, and morally reprehensible.
While that is a good argument for arming citizens in general, it really doesn't apply here. A policeman is far more likely than an ordinary citizen to encounter an apparent crime in progress. In such a situation, it may not always be clear who the 'bad guy' is (perhaps the guy holding a gun on someone else is an undercover cop, a citizen with a CCW, or a citizen who just disarmed his assailant). As a result, a policeman may sometimes misinterpret what's going on and consequently shoot the wrong person. By contrast, a law-abiding citizen who uses his gun for self-defense isn't going to have this problem. He may be just as likely to encounter a crime, but he's more likely to be there at the beginning. An armed citizen who's attacked by a mugger doesn't have to guess who the bad guy is, and consequently isn't too likely to be wrong.
In an airplane, it will be pretty obvious to everyone who at least some of the hijackers are (there may be sleepers who will not be obvious). Law-enforcement personnel will not be at their usual disadvantage in such a situation. Consequently, I would expect them to do no worse than ordinary citizens at identifying the right target.
There is, however, a different disadvantage to law-enforcement personnel: unless there are numerous armed personnel it would be a simple matter for two terrorists, seated on opposite sides of the aisle one row apart, to jump and disarm any LEO or armed guard that walked by. By contrast, if there are 15 secretly-armed citizens, a hijacker who disarms one will still be outnumbered fourteen-fold.
Life is not safe. The idea that it can be is one of the basic fallacies of the totalitarians. The death rate is the same everywhere: one per person.
A police officer is more likely to hit the target, and "innocents" are far more likely to be targets for the reasons you state and others. A civilian is less likely to shoot in the first place unless the target "needs shootin'."
Furthermore, a police officer is more likely to have to fire with a bunch of bystanders in the area. Baddies threatening civilians tend to choose isolated areas. Innocents are more likely to be in the field of fire when police are doing the shooting.
Finally, a civilian is less likely to have the luxury of "long shots" when shooting is necessary. At 3 yards or less, missing is hard to do....
I also have to fly (a lot) as part of my job -- and it's really not relevant what "makes us feel safer" or what one uncritically accepts as "common sense". It's my life you're offering up. Only facts will do when the stakes are that high. Of course, this thread is an academic argument, since the political discourse (not just here) is about feelings, not reason.
You seem thoughtful, but the question raised by the post is worthy of serious analysis. And, by the way, go back to my original paragraph -- I wasn't talking about firearms: are you opposed just to guns, or any form of effective self defense?
A few y You are wrong about this. ears ago a plane flying to Hawaii lost 20% of its fuselage and flew 700 miles, landing safely. The only people sucked out were the people right by the whole. Nobody died from lack of oxygen or got sucked out of windows. That doesn't happen. It is movie nonsense that the anti-civil rights extremists spread as fact.
The actual pressure differential is usually less than 8 psi.
The idea that a 9mm hole in the aircraft's fuselage would cause an explosive depressurization is purely a myth inspired by Hollywood. The pressure outflow duct which bleeds off air to maintain an even cabin pressure is many times larger than any bullet hole and there's at least one on every plane.
I read posts which use the Aloha Airlines 737 as an example of what would happen if a gun was fired in a plane at altitude. There is no comparison to that incident and a bullet hole. The Aloha 737 fuselage was cracked from too many thousands of TOAL cycles, and the cracks had allowed the salt air around the Hawaii area to corrode rivets. A huge section of the fuselage was blown off and even after that the plane not only survived, it landed safely with almost all the passengers intact. To compare losing a dozen or so square yards of fuselage with a few bullet holes is ludicrous.
"All Aircraft can fly just fine with zero pressurization. Remember, some of the most structurelly challenging phases of flight for a commercial Airliner are during take-off and landing-- when there is essentially no differential pressure."
"At cruise, breathing is another matter. Above 25000 ft, time of usful conciousness is a matter of seconds. In fact, in Fighters, the O-2 regulators shift to a "pressure breathing" mode of 100% 0-2 (you must forcefully exhale), this creates a higher partial pressure in your lounges to help transfer 0-2 to brain."
"The damage that could be caused by a "rapid decommpression" is also important. Stuff flying off your Aircraft can hit important things, noteably, control sufaces and motors. In Fighters, we negate this somewhat with a "Combat" setting for pressurization (2-3 PSI differential instead of 9-10 PSI). These low settings give a "cabin" altitude of around 25000 ft at 50000 ft "true" altitude."
Fly Safe, and don't F***-Up!!
Sorry about the spelling, Word is Down.
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