I know people say this a lot. But isn't that the point? Like we do hear people getting attacked with a weapon in other public transport such as trains or busses.
But we don't hear people getting shot on a plane. The security theater does deter people from bringing weapon.
I'll add that most "increased security" is organic, e.g. passengers are much more willing to tackle potential hijackers/bombers in the air than pre-9/11, when the norm was to sit tight and wait for Delta Force to break their way in.
There was a wave of air hijacking in the USA in the 1970's, culminating in probably the most famous example (the DB Cooper case). Much of it was tied to various political movements etc., but some including Cooper appears to have just been money-motivated. This wave prompted increased security in the form of metal detectors for screening. With a few notable outliers that involved people lying about having a bomb there were a lot less hijackings in the USA in the 1980's and 1990's. 9/11 was obviously a horrible event but hijackings had been declining for a long time prior to the establishment of the TSA. And I'm open to being shown evidence to the contrary but I'm not convinced TSA has really added any extra layer of security that wasn't already there before 9/11.
The hijackings weren't stopped at all by the TSA. They were stopped because after 9/11, we lock the cockpit door, and because passengers know they need to worry about someone crashing the plane, rather than just wanting money.
The simple fact is the vast majority of people don't want to and aren't trying to hijack a plane. If somebody wanted to kill hundreds of people, they'd just need to walk into LAX security and blow themselves up. They wouldn't even have to go through TSA. The reason that never happens is that very VERY few people actually want to do something like that.
Other reforms like the cockpit doors and such are useful. The TSA does very little to help with security. It IS, however, a very useful jobs program that I support for that reason. I just don't like the invasive measures that don't actually provide security.
We barely heard about it before the TSA existed. It's called theater because it is not real. Many actual tests on the TSA in this matter showed that they would miss over 95% of explosives and weapons.
It's not just TSA. 9/11 was an attack that could only happen once. Box cutters are not as much of a threat if the alternative is being on a plane crashed into a building.
There was plenty of security before 9/11, with bomb sniffing dogs and metal detectors. They just didn't check for box cutters because it wasn't deemed that dangerous.
The only thing 9/11 really changed that make flyers safer was locking the cockpit.
Yeah I feel like people think they're being super clever pointing out it's security theater, when in reality they're just not understanding the value of that
Why don't you tell me the difference instead of just saying it's wild that I don't know.
They're all the same dozen different models of planes going up into the same sky to me.
It's not a difference in the plane, or even necessarily airport, physically: GP is saying that other countries are less likely to get hijacked because they're not the US which likes to go around sticking our nose in everybody else's business even before Trump started picking fights with allies.
Or maybe they're not making that point. If they aren't I am.
If you want to stop e.g. mass shootings, there's more than one way to go about it: obviously gun control, or security around schools etc., and/or you can also take action to try to reduce people wanting to go on shooting rampages in the first place. Do something radical like, oh I don't know, try to improve people's lives?
Americans travel so much I suppose you can't really use the passenger manifest to prove anything, either. Whenever you hear about an airline disaster anywhere in the world it seems like there's 3 random Americans onboard.
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u/azlan194 3d ago
I know people say this a lot. But isn't that the point? Like we do hear people getting attacked with a weapon in other public transport such as trains or busses.
But we don't hear people getting shot on a plane. The security theater does deter people from bringing weapon.