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Posted on 09/16/2001 3:03:35 PM PDT by sendtoscott

THE PASSENGERS WERE ALL DISARMED
   by Vin Suprynowicz 
   Special to TLE

For years, Americans hoping to travel peacefully between major cities
have suffered the indignity of being run through metal detectors,
being made to empty our pockets and our purses, remove our belt
buckles and our steel-insoled boots, answer rote questions about
whether we've stupidly let some guy in a turban insert in our bags a
"gift for my sister in Boston."

Our bags have been scanned and subjected to "random searches."

All of this has cost us millions of productive hours wasted, not to
mention billions in salaries for these laughably ineffective goons,
all dutifully passed on to us in the price of our airline tickets.

I have long warned the only reason no plane was hijacked in this
country in the past decade was because no serious terrorist had
tried. "The Fred and Ethel Mertz security system" would have zero
impact on anyone serious enough to plan ahead and plant a "mole"
among the minimum wage employees who load soda pop and TV dinners
aboard our aircraft.

Tuesday, I hoped I was wrong. As it quickly became clear terrorists
had placed several agents aboard each of four transcontinental
flights taking off from Eastern airports with an aim to using those
fueled-up jets as flying bombs, I waited to hear in how many cases
our crack security operatives had polished off the would-be
terrorists before they ever made it to the plane.

Had all the metal detectors and bomb-sniffing wands and random bag
checks and "may I see your travel papers please" stopped even one
terrorist team?

Nope. The Fred and Ethel Mertz security system stoppeth not even one
in four. The only reason one of the four planes failed to hit its
target - it now appears from passenger cell phone calls made from the
plane which crashed near Pittsburgh - is that some brave American men
decided to "do something," counterattacking their captors.

So what will Congress and the FAA and the airlines - the ones that
manage to avoid immediate bankruptcy - do in the months to come?

Will the Powers That Be conclude, "Well, we tried disarming
law-abiding Americans and running the metal detectors and scanning
the bags; that obviously didn't work. So, we might as well try the
Archie Bunker plan"?

(Decades ago, leftist series creator Norman Lear had Carroll
O'Connor's lead character in the TV show "All in the Family" propose
the best way to prevent airline hijackings was to issue loaded
firearms to the passengers upon boarding, collecting them again as
the travelers disembarked. "Norman Lear obviously thought the notion
represented the very height of right-wing absurdity," my friend,
novelist L. Neil Smith, wrote to me last week. "But somebody tell me
-- now -- how an aircraft full of well-armed people could be hijacked
and used against civilization the way four were today.")

No, there will be no restoration of the Second Amendment in once free
and fearless America. Instead, fulfilling a pretty good definition of
insanity, what they'll do is a whole lot more of what already hasn't
worked.

Now we're going to make our law-abiding disarmed victims-to-be wait
in even _more_ interminable lines while we search their bags and
their persons really, really, really well.

For nail-clippers and scissors and little, tiny knives.

"That's not gonna do any good, it's the minimum wage employee comin'
in the back door who did this," exclaims my friend Pete the pilot (he
didn't want me to use his real name.) Pete flies 757s and 767s -
precisely the models that were hijacked - for a major airline back
East.

Today's commercial aircraft swarm with people in the hours before
they take off, Pete explained to me last Tuesday. From the janitors
who vacuum out the planes to the employees of the contract catering
firms that load the TV dinners and the soda pop into the pantries,
these tend to be minimum-wage employees, often recent immigrants in
high-turnover jobs. Background checks on these workers are minimal to
nonexistent, Pete explains. A mail-order driver's license would get
Osama bin Laden's nephew one of these jobs, whereupon all he would
have to do is wait to be told which night to leave the knives and
box-cutters - or the full-auto Uzi, for that matter - in with the ice
cubes or under the cushion of seat 11-C.

But that won't be fixed, Pete says. Instead, he (and all of us) will
be banned from carrying even his little Schrade Old-Timer
pocket-knife with the under-four-inch blade. "It'll all be, as it
always has been, public-relations sort of stuff; they'll make it
_appear_ that they're doing something. ... I worry they'll impose
more Draconian restrictions on our liberties that aren't gonna make
us any more secure.

"It's company policy that the pilots can't be armed on the airplane,"
Pete says. "Now we've seen from recent events that that makes us
sitting ducks."
- - -
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to
Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or
dialing 775-348-8591.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

9. WHILE NORMAN LEARED
   by L. Neil Smith 
   Special to TLE

Professor John Lott wrote a book a few years ago, called _More Guns
Mean Less Crime_, in which he said things -- the mere title was
enough -- that still have the victim disarmament crowd screaming and
weeping. Today, after horrifying attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, we can now safely observe that no guns mean the
ultimate crime.

When I started writing my first novel, _The Probability Broach_, in
1977, I was just back from a national Libertarian Party convention
where I was almost laughed off the platform committee I was a member
of, because I introduced a plank warning that airport security --
featuring metal detectors, X-ray machines, and Air Marshalls -- which
was a relatively new thing back then, represented the seeds of a
police state. Each year that's passed since then has only proven that
I was right. I now rest my case -- although I'm not promising to shut
up.

One of the features of _The Probability Broach_ that was fun to
write, and just as significant as my prediction, in the same book, of
the Internet as we now know it, was a scene in which the hero, a cop
from our world, boards an aircraft with his friends and is startled
when representatives of the company merely want him to demonstrate
that the ammunition in the guns he carries is designed not to harm
the aircraft.

I confess that I got this idea, way back then, from an episode of
_All in the Family_ in which Archie Bunker proposes arming airline
passengers to prevent hijackings. Norman Lear obviously thought the
notion represented the very height of right-wing absurdity. But
somebody tell me -- now -- how an aircraft full of well-armed people
could be hijacked and used against civilization the way five were
today.

I'm not the only one who's thought of this. I have messages from
others, including my good friend Tom Knapp, who would agree with me
that everyone who died today, or was injured, in any of these attacks
was, first and foremost, a victim of Thomas Dodd, Howard Metzenbaum,
Pete Shields, Sarah Brady, Charles Schumer, Diane Feinstein, Diana
DeGette, and anybody else who ever strove to disarm victims of crime
-- not to forget Norman Lear himself who's spent most of his overly
long life ridiculing everything that made this culture prosperous and
safe.

And a special thought has to go out to the Manchurian Candidate
himself, gungrabbing Senator John McCain, whose blabbery about this
event is being broadcast everywhere by the whorish media who adore
him so.

However it's also important to thank Wayne LaPierre and all other
so-called Second Amendment leaders who've cozied up to the anti-gun
crowd. Moreover, H.L. Richardson presently doing his best to wreck
Gun Owners of America, had better quit trying to imitate LaPierre
right now, and start holding the line again. With the Internet
nipping at his heels, he'll achieve nothing he values in trying to
suck up to the Republicans.

An armed society -- a society consisting of armed individuals -- is
not immune to terrorism. No truly open society can be. But today's
acts would simply have been impossible to carry out successfully.
What's more, today's events turn one's mind to thoughts of Vin
Suprynowicz who, more than any other pro-freedom writer, has been
concerned with restoring the individual's right to really
_large_ weapons.

Suppose the terrorists had stolen empty planes, sidestepping the
threat represented by armed passengers. The giant World Trade Center
buildings have been the target of terrorists before -- conspicuous,
juicy targets. And yet seven decades of wholly illegal gun laws
prevented their owners or tenants from placing anti-aircraft guns or
rockets, or gatling guns made to shoot down cruise missiles, on their
roofs.

More proof that gun control kills.

Sooner or later, all of this will run its course and we'll find
ourselves on the other side of these events, looking back. Almost
everyone I'm listening to agrees that things will never be the same
in America.

That can happen, of course, in either of two ways. Unlike other
countries -- pre-World War II Germany, for example -- people trusted
the government. When things like this happened and the state turned
the tap handle on their liberty, they believed it only had their best
interests at heart. Today, thanks to terrible events from the Kennedy
assassination to Waco, you'd be pressed to find a four-year-old who
does.

America would never be the same if this event inspired us to make the
21st century the century of the Bill of Rights. There are many -- I
just saw a pessimistic message from Jerry Pournelle that the US will
now become an empire forever -- who consider that impossible. But we
advocates of liberty have a powerful argument to make about how Bill
of Rights enforcement could have prevented this evil, deliberate
disaster.

It's time to make that argument, as loudly and as widely as we can.

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