Arm the Passengers

http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/ ^ | 3 june 02 | Armed and Dangerous

[white trash redneck]

Arm the Passengers:

The recent controversy over arming airline pilots against a possible repetition of the 9/11 atrocity misses a crucial problem that makes arming pilots relatively ineffective: terrorists would know in advance where the guns are, and be able to game against that.

Let's say you are a terrorist executing a hijacking. You know the pilots are armed. Then here are your tactics -- you send the pilots a message that you will begin shooting cabin crew and passengers, one every five minutes, until the pilots throw their guns into the main cabin. Just to make sure, you split your gang into an A team and a B team. After the pilots have thrown out some guns, you send the A team into the cockpit. If the pilots resist, the B team kills more people.

Sky marshals can be taken out in a similar way. Your B team, armed with knives, breaks cover and announces the hijacking. The sky marshals (if there are any present; they're now flying on less than 1% of planes, and can't be trained fast enough for that figure to go up significantly in the foreseeable future) break cover. Now your A team, armed with guns, breaks cover and disposes of the sky marshals. Game over.

Anyone who thinks either scenario can be prevented by keeping firearms off-board should put down that crack pipe now. Tiger team exercises after 9/11 have repeatedly demonstrated that the new, improved airport security has had effectively zero impact on a determined bad-guy's ability to sneak weapons past checkpoints -- it's still easy. Despite government spin, there is no prospect this will change; the underlying problem is just too hard.

For terrorists to be effectively deterred, they need to face a conterthreat they cannot scope out in advance. That's why the right solution is to arm the passengers, not just the pilots.

Now, as a terrorist, you would be facing an unknown number of guns potentially pointed at you from all directions. Go ahead; take that flight attendant hostage. You can't use her to make people give up weapons neither you nor she knows they have. You have to assume you're outnumbered, and you dare not turn your back on anyone, because you don't know who might be packing.

The anti-gun bien pensants of the world wet their pants at the thought of flying airplanes containing hundreds of armed civilians. They would have you believe that this would be a sure recipe for carnage on every flight, an epidemic of berserk yahoos blowing bullet holes through innocent bystanders and the cabin walls. When you ask why this didn't happen before 1971 when there were no firearms restrictions on airplanes, they evade the question.

The worst realistic case from arming passengers is that some gang of terrorist pukes tries to bust a move anyway, and innocent bystanders get killed by stray bullets while the passengers are taking out the terrorists. That would be bad -- but, post-9/11, the major aim of air security can no longer be saving passenger lives. Instead, it has to be preventing the use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction. Thus: we should arm the passengers to save the lives of thousands more bystanders on the ground.

And, about that stray-bullet thing. Airplanes aren't balloons. They don't pop when you put a round through the fuselage. A handful of bullet holes simply cannot leak air fast enough to be dangerous; there would be plenty of time to drop the plane into the troposphere. To sidestep the problem, encourage air travelers to carry fragmenting ammunition like Glaser rounds.

Think of it. No more mile-long security lines, no more obnoxious baggage searches, no more women getting groped by bored security guards, no more police-state requirement that you show an ID before boarding, no more flimsy plastic tableware. Simpler, safer, faster air travel with a bullet through the head reserved for terrorists.

Extending this lesson to other circumstances, like when we're not surrounded by a fuselage, is left as an exercise for the reader...

[Virginia-American]

I'd *require* the passengers over 18 to be armed. Simply make the passengers part of the militia, under the command of the pilot and crew.

[archy]

Good choice except it takes a lot of passengers out along with the bad guys. Great for point blank. Classified as a destructive device with a $5 fee and registration.

Nope, classified as a destructive device with $200 transfer tax fee. Happily, there's no minimum barrel length specified for DDs, so they can be chopped to whatever handy configuration the user likes.

It's pistol-grip-only stocked shorty shotguns, as per the Serbu *super shorty* below, that carry the *Any Other Weapon* or *AOW* $5 transfer tax- a short-barrelled shotgun with full buttstock, or a short-barrelled stocked rifle also is taxed at the $200 rate.

-archy-/-

[packrat01]

Well, they might stop the first few slugs; but after being properly ventilated, the last few magazines-full would whistle right on through.