Stop punishing us at airports - punish the wrongdoers

When Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma, the Feds’ reaction was to tighten and monitor all sales of commercial fertilizer. Farmers and farmer suppliers waste hours filling in forms and tracking shipments, raising food prices in the process.

When the shoe bomber tried to ignite his shoes that he had sneaked past the works-program dolts (the TSA), we all had to start removing our shoes, adding time and effort to our journey and wasting money on more screeners and people to handle the longer lines.

When some criminal robs a 24/7 convenience store and shoots the cashier, or when a nutter shoots President Reagan, gun laws are tightened, thousands of employees are hired at the federal level, increasing your taxes, legal gun owners all across the country have to spend more time and money abiding by new laws and American workers are laid off at factories as legal gun sales go down. Not one criminal is affected.

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When cars were first on the roads, pedestrians were getting killed and there was an outcry to ban all cars from public highways. What was the result? Laws, hundreds and hundreds of laws, most of them still on the books. Then people were outraged via Ralph Nader that your car didn’t “protect you� enough in an accident.

You now drive a car that is perfectly safe, weighs twice as much as it did 25 years ago, costing you thousands in gas and original cost — gas which means imported oil, which means funding those countries of radicals who … and so on.

When a “radicalized� nut from Nigeria gets past lists, interviews, visa processes (his Yemen visa was facing the United States visa in his passport!) — even his own father says he was becoming unstable — and then this nut gets on a plane and tries to blow up his underpants … well, you know what’s coming next at an airport near you: The Feds will want to search your underwear. It’s the TSA and government way. Like the boy and the dyke in Holland, we just keep sticking our fingers into holes and hoping the deluge will subside.

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Just after 9/11, I was standing in a line at Frankfurt Airport and everyone was grumbling about the long lines for security, about being patted down and searched, but how we all needed to adjust our thinking. One man turned to address everyone. In a loud voice he said, “We don’t need to adjust or tighten security, we need to get rid of the need for security.�

He has a point, one that the past administration had failed to implement with two wars and, worse still, the completely failed implementation of many basic security measures to make American travel and homeland security a sure thing (or as sure as one can get). This administration, with a very weak and misinformed Janet Napolitano leading the way, has taken over a failed security system and, frankly if she’s anything to go by, made it worse, grinning as she assured everyone that “everything worked properly� at the TSA.

Let’s just take one basic of security for plane travel: Explosive detection devices are well known and tested in the military. They cost money. With the TSA jobs program preferred over spending money wisely, we still have none of these in place eight years after 9/11.

Oh, and if you want the best explosive detection device, you bring in the trained dogs. Station one next to every check-in, next to every boarding gate. They can detect explosives even if you are carrying them internally.

Why don’t they have more dogs at airports? Because some passengers are afraid of dogs, poor babies, they complain to the airlines they are frightened and want the “threatening dogs� removed. I wonder how frightened they will really be when a bomb goes off because of their spineless complaints?

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Until we deal with these threats logically, until we stop throwing up quick-fix solutions like shoe X-ray or perhaps underwear search, until we stop punishing the innocent law-abiding people as a means of deterring the evildoers and criminals, we will never find a solution.

Gun laws (besides the Constitutional issue) are unworkable when it comes to crime. In Britain and France they have strict gun laws, and yet criminals there have guns aplenty — so many in fact that police are now regularly armed themselves (whilst the population is preventing from owning arms for self-protection).

I am not against the police protecting me, I am not against security at airports (proper security, not a bunch of bottom-of-the-hiring pool so-called “screening experts�), but I am against being treated as a criminal by my government as a means for them to create a set of rules they can use in court against real wrong-doers or to look good to reporters.

I wear shoes, I wear underpants. I have a right not to expose myself in public. I do want them to screen everyone, if they need to, until they fix the problem. But I want that screening to be targeted against those who would do harm, not a catch-all approach which, because of the millions of people travelling every day, is unable to be truly effective, just looks effective.

In short, a two-hour screening process means a waste of two hours; it does not mean we are any safer. The underwear bomber proved that.

Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.