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NY Times on Arming Pilots
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Packing Heat on the Flight Deck
ashington has done a startling and politically gutless turnabout on guns in the cockpit. Only last spring nearly everyone involved in regulating air safety thought the idea of giving guns to pilots was a desperate, potentially calamitous way to prevent hijackings. Now many of the same people are stampeding in the opposite direction, spurred on by the National Rifle Association. On Thursday the Senate was swept along by the tide, voting 87 to 6 to arm pilots in a trial program. The House passed a similar measure in July.
There are two plausible explanations for this baffling change of sentiment, both alarming. Either Congress and the administration have become so complacent about security a year after the Sept. 11 terror attacks that they are now willing to play politics on a serious security issue by succumbing to the powerful gun lobby, or they have become so unsure of their ability to carry out their own program for protecting the flying public that they are giving up and accepting a reckless alternative.
President Bush must assert leadership here, and reassure travelers that neither politics nor a sense of helplessness has overtaken the federal effort to secure the skies. He should veto the gun measure if it reaches his desk. The reasons that his administration initially opposed arming pilots are still sound.
The new Transportation Security Administration has given critics reason to question its ability to meet the ambitious deadlines set by Congress for installing new passenger screeners and bomb-detecting machines at airports. A program to arm up to 70,000 commercial pilots would only create more disarray. The aim of the whole aviation security effort is to keep weapons off aircraft, except for guns carried by undercover air marshals, and to seal off cockpits altogether. Airlines have already installed locking metal bars on cockpit doors and face an April deadline for providing impregnable, bulletproof compartments.
Expecting pilots to engage in gunplay while trying to keep their aircraft on course, and announcing to all the world that there will be guns in the cockpit that could be commandeered, is not a sensible counterterrorist strategy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/07/opinion/07SAT1.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
ashington has done a startling and politically gutless turnabout on guns in the cockpit. Only last spring nearly everyone involved in regulating air safety thought the idea of giving guns to pilots was a desperate, potentially calamitous way to prevent hijackings. Now many of the same people are stampeding in the opposite direction, spurred on by the National Rifle Association. On Thursday the Senate was swept along by the tide, voting 87 to 6 to arm pilots in a trial program. The House passed a similar measure in July.
There are two plausible explanations for this baffling change of sentiment, both alarming. Either Congress and the administration have become so complacent about security a year after the Sept. 11 terror attacks that they are now willing to play politics on a serious security issue by succumbing to the powerful gun lobby, or they have become so unsure of their ability to carry out their own program for protecting the flying public that they are giving up and accepting a reckless alternative.
President Bush must assert leadership here, and reassure travelers that neither politics nor a sense of helplessness has overtaken the federal effort to secure the skies. He should veto the gun measure if it reaches his desk. The reasons that his administration initially opposed arming pilots are still sound.
The new Transportation Security Administration has given critics reason to question its ability to meet the ambitious deadlines set by Congress for installing new passenger screeners and bomb-detecting machines at airports. A program to arm up to 70,000 commercial pilots would only create more disarray. The aim of the whole aviation security effort is to keep weapons off aircraft, except for guns carried by undercover air marshals, and to seal off cockpits altogether. Airlines have already installed locking metal bars on cockpit doors and face an April deadline for providing impregnable, bulletproof compartments.
Expecting pilots to engage in gunplay while trying to keep their aircraft on course, and announcing to all the world that there will be guns in the cockpit that could be commandeered, is not a sensible counterterrorist strategy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/07/opinion/07SAT1.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Comments
If I'm wrong please correct me, I won't be offended.
The sound of a 12 gauge pump clears a house fatser than Rosie O eats a Big Mac !
What a bunch of flaming 'hole dweebs!
Edited by - Iconoclast on 09/07/2002 09:53:08
Please don't interject reason and thought into this issue, they will just look bad.
"If you ain't got pictures, I wasn't there."
Margaret Thatcher
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
Mark Twain
"Sometimes the people have to give up some individual rights for the safety of society."
-Bill Clinton(MTV interview)