[Redbob45]

"...a News reporter used her expired driver's license 18 times and was questioned about it only twice.

And your point is?
Does a person's identity somehow expire along with her driver's license?

[supercat]

"We don't have better airport security in this country," said Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant from Evergreen, Colo., when told of The News' investigation. "... All we have is more inconvenient security." Yup. And the government can't figure out why more people aren't willing to fly.

[Mulder]

"‘Profiling' is not a dirty word," Kelly said. "Of course, racial profiling is not wanted.

Well, he's got it half right.

[Amanda King]

My husband has to fly weekly to client sites and he is beside himself with the lack of identity checks. Somebody please explain what keeps people from switching boarding passes after they pass through the initial security check if they aren't checking ID as you board the plane? Or does this not matter?

[epow]

This is exactly why pilots need to be allowed to carry guns in the flight deck. My son drives 727s for a living, and he is beyond upset about the Mickey Mouse security he sees every day.

He told me how at one airport recently while passengers were being passed through with only a walk through the metal detector, a security woman made a big show of patting down him, the flight engineer, and the captain, and then squeezing the sides of their shoes. When he asked what she was looking for in their shoes, she told him "boxcutters". He politely said something like, "Ma'am, I know you're just doing your job, but when we step into the flight deck of the plane there's a big red fire axe hanging on the bulkhead. If one of us wanted to kill the other two and crash the plane we wouldn't need to fool around with a boxcutter".

There are only 18 air marshalls right now to cover thousands of flights, and it will be over a year before enough are trained and ready. Pilots should be armed and sent through one of the commercial shooting schools or the FBI course at Quantico. If you can't trust the pilot, who on the plane can you trust? There's nobody on the plane who has been more thoroughly investigated than the flight crew. We trust them to fly the plane, why can't we trust them with a gun for Pete's sake? The pilots want to be armed, the security experts say they should be, and polls show that most of the people want them to be. The only people who don't want it are Sarah Brady, the anti-gun jerks in congress, and apparently Mr. Bush.

Write your congressman and President Bush. It could mean life or death for a plane full of people some day, plus who knows how many people on the ground.