Thomas Sowell - Consumer Reports
California's liberal Senator favors arming pilots and the Bushies
don't!?
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com
In a stunning reversal, California's liberal Senator Barbara Boxer
has come out in favor of allowing airline pilots to carry guns if they
wish, while the Bush administration opposes it. Meanwhile, the House of
Representatives has passed a bill to permit pilots to carry guns by a
vote of 310 to 113.
Although Sen. Boxer is a staunch supporter of gun control, on this
particular issue she clearly understands that it is better to have an
armed pilot than to have to order a military plane to shoot down one of
our own commercial airliners, full of innocent people, because hijackers
have taken it over and are ready to do a repeat of last Sept.
11.
We can only hope that the administration is as willing as Sen. Boxer to
re-think its position of opposing the arming of pilots. But the
Department of Transportation remains closed-minded on the issue. When
asked by Congressman Don Young, "Do you really think that 9/11 would
have happened if our pilots had been armed, as they should have been
armed?" a spokesman for the Department of Transportation replied:
"Our position remains unchanged." It was reminiscent of the
famous line: "'Shut up,' he explained."
Opponents of allowing pilots to be armed have portrayed horror movie
visions of pilots and terrorists shooting it out in the aisles of
airliners. But the main reason for arming pilots is not so that they can
re-enact the gunfight at the OK corral. The main reason for having guns
for self-defense anywhere is deterrence. In John Lott's landmark
scholarly study titled "More Guns, Less Crime," he points out
that most instances of the successful use of a gun in self-defense do not
involve actually firing it. Just showing an aggressor that you have a
firearm is usually enough to make him back off. Having it widely known in
advance that people in certain places have guns is a huge deterrent to
those who might otherwise be inclined to start trouble in those
places.
Communities that have passed laws permitting any law-abiding citizen to
carry a gun usually have immediate declines in crimes in the wake of such
laws. Both criminals and terrorists prefer to attack unarmed
civilians.
Even mass killers labeled "irrational" by the media and by
shrinks almost invariably start shooting in places where other people are
unarmed, like schools or offices. And they stop when they encounter
someone else who is armed. If not, they get stopped, like the assassin at
Los Angeles International Airport on July 4th. Depending on armed
marshals aboard airplanes might be an alter- native to arming pilots --
if there were any realistic prospect of putting marshals on even half the
vast numbers of planes that are flying every day. But hypothetical
marshals are no substitute for real pilots with real guns.
Depending on stronger cockpit doors might be another alternative -- if
all these doors on vast numbers of airliners could be strengthened faster
than pilots can get guns. But hypothetical doors are no more protection
than hypothetical marshals. Tests have also repeatedly shown that the
effectiveness of security screening at our airports is also largely
hypothetical.
Part of the reason for the knee-jerk reaction to firearms may be that we
now have a whole generation of people -- especially in politics and among
opinion-makers in the media -- who have never served in the armed forces
and have no experience with guns. Fear from ignorance is understandable.
But that it should be presumptuous ignorance is not.
Are there any possible dangers to arming pilots? Of course! There are
dangers to your holding this newspaper, which might catch fire and set
off a conflagration around you. Nothing on the face of this earth is 100
percent safe. We already know that flying on a plane with no one on board
who is armed to resist terrorists is not safe.
The only meaningful question is which danger is greater. The swiftness
with which the idea of arming pilots was dismissed suggests no serious
interest in weighing one danger against another.
It may be understandable that the Bush administration does not want to
buck the media on this emotional issue in an election year. But will the
widows and orphans of those who lose their lives, because there was no
armed person on board to thwart terrorists, be understanding?
_______________________
Scott MacLean
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