{"id":11,"date":"2002-06-01T06:05:00","date_gmt":"2002-06-01T11:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=11"},"modified":"2002-06-01T06:05:00","modified_gmt":"2002-06-01T11:05:00","slug":"arm-the-passengers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=11","title":{"rendered":"Arm the Passengers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The recent controversy over arming airline pilots against a<br \/>\npossible repetition of the 9\/11 atrocity misses a crucial problem that<br \/>\nmakes arming pilots relatively ineffective: terrorists would know in<br \/>\nadvance where the guns are, and be able to game against that.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s say you are a terrorist executing a hijacking.  You know the pilots<br \/>\nare armed.  Then here are your tactics &#8212; you send the pilots a message that<br \/>\nyou will begin shooting cabin crew and passengers, one every five minutes,<br \/>\nuntil the pilots throw their guns into the main cabin.  Just to make sure,<br \/>\nyou split your gang into an A team and a B team.  After the pilots have<br \/>\nthrown out some guns, you send the A team into the cockpit.  If the pilots<br \/>\nresist, the B team kills more people.<\/p>\n<p>Sky marshals can be taken out in a similar way.  Your B team, armed<br \/>\nwith knives, breaks cover and announces the hijacking. The sky<br \/>\nmarshals (if there are any present; they&#8217;re now flying on less than 1%<br \/>\nof planes, and can&#8217;t be trained fast enough for that figure to go up<br \/>\nsignificantly in the foreseeable future) break cover.  Now your A<br \/>\nteam, armed with guns, breaks cover and disposes of the sky marshals.<br \/>\nGame over.<\/p>\n<p>Anyone who thinks either scenario can be prevented by keeping<br \/>\nfirearms off-board should put down that crack pipe <em>now<\/em>.<br \/>\nTiger team exercises after 9\/11 have repeatedly <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2002\/US\/03\/25\/airport.security\/?related\"><br \/>\ndemonstrated<\/a> that the new, improved airport security has had<br \/>\neffectively zero impact on a determined bad-guy&#8217;s ability to sneak<br \/>\nweapons past checkpoints &#8212; it&#8217;s still easy.  Despite government spin,<br \/>\nthere is no prospect this will change; the underlying problem is just<br \/>\ntoo hard.<\/p>\n<p>For terrorists to be effectively deterred, they need to face a<br \/>\nconterthreat they cannot scope out in advance.  That&#8217;s why the right<br \/>\nsolution is to arm the <em>passengers<\/em>, not just the pilots.<\/p>\n<p>Now, as a terrorist, you would be facing an unknown number of guns<br \/>\npotentially pointed at you from all directions.  Go ahead; take that<br \/>\nflight attendant hostage.  You can&#8217;t use her to make people give up<br \/>\nweapons neither you nor she knows they have.  You have to assume<br \/>\nyou&#8217;re outnumbered, and you dare not turn your back on<br \/>\n<em>anyone<\/em>, because you don&#8217;t know who might be packing.<\/p>\n<p>The anti-gun <em>bien pensants<\/em> of the world wet their pants at<br \/>\nthe thought of flying airplanes containing hundreds of armed<br \/>\ncivilians.  They would have you believe that this would be a sure<br \/>\nrecipe for carnage on every flight, an epidemic of berserk yahoos<br \/>\nblowing bullet holes through innocent bystanders and the cabin walls.<br \/>\nWhen you ask why this didn&#8217;t happen before 1971 when there were no<br \/>\nfirearms restrictions on airplanes, they evade the question.<\/p>\n<p>The worst realistic case from arming passengers is that some gang<br \/>\nof terrorist pukes tries to bust a move anyway, and innocent<br \/>\nbystanders get killed by stray bullets while the passengers are taking<br \/>\nout the terrorists.  That would be bad &#8212; but, post-9\/11, the major<br \/>\naim of air security can no longer be saving passenger lives.  Instead,<br \/>\nit has to be preventing the use of airplanes as weapons of mass<br \/>\ndestruction.  Thus: we should arm the passengers to save the lives of<br \/>\nthousands more bystanders on the ground.<\/p>\n<p>And, about that stray-bullet thing.  Airplanes aren&#8217;t balloons.<br \/>\nThey don&#8217;t pop when you put a round through the fuselage.  A handful<br \/>\nof bullet holes simply cannot leak air fast enough to be dangerous;<br \/>\nthere would be plenty of time to drop the plane into the troposphere.<br \/>\nTo sidestep the problem, encourage air travelers to carry fragmenting<br \/>\nammunition like Glaser rounds.<\/p>\n<p>Think of it.  No more mile-long security lines, no more obnoxious<br \/>\nbaggage searches, no more women getting groped by bored security<br \/>\nguards, no more police-state requirement that you show an ID before<br \/>\nboarding, no more flimsy plastic tableware.  Simpler, safer, faster<br \/>\nair travel with a bullet through the head reserved for terrorists.<\/p>\n<p>Extending this lesson to other circumstances, like when we&#8217;re<br \/>\n<em>not<\/em> surrounded by a fuselage, is left as an exercise for<br \/>\nthe reader&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=77217747\">Blogspot comment<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s say you are a terrorist executing a hijacking. You know the pilots are&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=11\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Arm the Passengers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terror","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}