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Published 01 November 2001 (word count: 753)
The grandmotherly secretary at my day job knew exactly how to foil jetjackers. Everyone packs a photo document embedded with finger and retina prints. At the airport you subject your face, fingers and eyeballs to the digital scanners. If you and your documents don’t match you don’t get on the plane.
I figured she was just too hip to think of such low tech alternatives as registered Hereford style metal ear clips or migratory bird leg bands or even bar codes tattooed on our napes ala Jessica Alba in “Dark Angel.”
I also decided not to ruin her day, and possibly give her bedwetting running-in-quicksand nightmares, by suggesting that airlines could simply issue handguns with plastic bullets to every passenger who wants one.
Yes, by now we’ve all seen the cartoons of frequent fliers drawing down on box cutter wielding terrorists or read the articles about locked and loaded passengers in a Second Amendment America. But libertarians who prescribe specific solutions for specific problems are in danger of sounding just like the tunnel-visioned control freak bureaucrats they hate so much, forgetting that one size does not fit all.
In fact, there’s nothing at all wrong with Grandmotherly Secretary’s vision of security as long as it’s done between consenting adults, i.e., passengers and airlines. In a free society an airline must operate like any other business – cater to their customers or lose them to competitors. When taxpayer funded bailouts don’t exist, when CEOs get fired for failure (unlike the aforementioned bureaucrats who get rewarded with bigger budgets when they demonstrate their incompetence) and when insurance carriers are subject to massive life and property loss payouts or simply refuse to indemnify against terrorist takeovers, a whole lot of people suddenly become very creative in the problem-solving arena.
Polls have shown a strong Grandmotherly Secretary sentiment for surrendering personal freedoms and dignities for the promise of security. Who are libertarians to thwart their wishes? In a society where public servants are actually servants and not masters, a savvy airline will eagerly offer super absorbent MaxiPad security flights to those who can’t or won’t take responsibility for their own safety. Maybe Guido gets off on being poked, prodded and patted down. Maybe Tiffany feels safer when she’s x-rayed, cat scanned and sonogrammed. (“It’s a girl, Ms. Tiffany!”)
If airlines are held responsible for all death and destruction, including targets on the ground, they’ll quickly put extreme measures in place (unlike the vaunted Office of Homeland Defense who’ll spend months protecting us with reams of environmentally correct recycled paper and little else.) And, like any other form of insurance, the less risk you assume the more you’ll pony up for tickets. Want to be watched over by a squad of armed Steven Segals? (Or Katey Sagals if you insist on gender correctness.) Fine. But their salaries will be passed on to you. That may make flying too expensive for the average Grandmotherly Secretary, but then nobody ever said fares should be so low that a wide body gets turned into a Third World bus.
But opt for a flight that allows passengers to pack heat and you get a discount. You’re not only assuming your own protection but you’re helping to safeguard the airline’s assets as well. They might even compete for your business, offering reduced fares to people with carry permits, NRA card-holders, or even (consider the irony) members of the Muslim-American Gun Owners Club.
You already have your own list of ideas. Electrified cabin doors with a gun-toting cockpit crew. Employees with hoglegs on their hips. “Serving you in first class today is Head Flight Attendant Pearl Hanndahls, winner of United Airline’s monthly Quickdraw competition.” A cockpit door festooned with greasy pork sausage links just might be enough to ward off fundamentalist Muslim terrorists. Ideas that haven’t even been thought of yet may be the best ideas of all.
Congress passed super snooper laws that make us all terrorist suspects until some federal wiretapper or cyberspook decides we’re not. That’s the government’s idea of one size fits all. Libertarians should never offer the shapeless muumuu of one size either. We should simply recommend that everybody slip into the Bill of Rights and try it on for size. It’s more freedom, not less, that generates more security. Thus, In a world of free-thinking individuals, Rosie O’Donnell has every right to jet out on the Sarah Brady Voluntary Disarmament Flight while her armed bodyguard and her kids kick back on the Saturday Night Special.
Many sizes fit many.
- by Garry Reed
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