How to Stop Hijackers from Using Planes as Weapons
——– Original Message ——–
Subject: RKBA Alert – How to Stop Hijackers from Using Planes as Weapons
- Clayton Cramer
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 21:30:58 -0700
From: “GGUNRAMC” <info@g…>
Reply-To: info@g…

<free to redistribute widely>

As we discovered on Tuesday, hijackers don’t just seize an airplane for
transportation, and they aren’t content to hold the passengers for
ransom. They aren’t even content anymore to kill just the passengers.
Now they use airliners as weapons themselves. We must either find a way
to stop terrorists from making this use of airliners, or end airline
travel.

How did this happen? We have built our airline security systems around
hijackers of the past. In the United States, hijackers were usually
mentally disturbed people with a gun. Such people were seldom rational
or organized enough to sneak a weapon through the poor quality security
that most American airports have.

Am I being too harsh on our screening procedures? I don’t think so. Back
in the 1980s, a friend of mine carried a lead-lined bag in his
briefcase, just to see if anyone would ask to see the contents. On the
21st time through a security checkpoint, they asked him to open his
briefcase, and the lead-lined bag.

This problem is still with us today. I forgot to take a lockback knife
with a 3.5″ blade out of my pocket before getting on an airline flight
in Salt Lake City last year. The metal detector found it, but the
security guard let me take it on the flight. This didn’t bother me,
because I trust myself very much, but it made me wonder what else the
security guards were letting onboard the plane.

We can certainly improve screening procedures, but like all such
crisis-driven changes, we can’t expect tightened security to continue
indefinitely. The guards that screen passengers become bored; the
passengers whine about long lines; the vast majority of questionable
items that show up on the X-ray machines turn out to be nothing at all.
The knives that the terrorists apparently used on Tuesday may not even
have gone through the security checkpoint at all, if caterers or
cleaners smuggled the weapons onboard. If improved security is only a
temporary solution, is there a long-term solution that prevents
terrorists from using airliners as very large cannonballs?

We used to have sky marshals–federal law enforcement officers who were
aboard some flights, undercover, and armed with guns using special, low
penetration ammunition to reduce the risk of damaging the airliner. We
don’t have sky marshals anymore. To my knowledge, they never fired a gun
onboard an airliner. If they ever arrested a hijacker, it received very
little publicity. Unfortunately, sky marshals were not on every flight.
If we brought them back, terrorists would probably take their chances.
If terrorists hijacked four planes, as happened Tuesday, it seems likely
that at least three of those flights would have no sky marshals to stop
them.

There’s a simple solution: arm the pilots. We already trust airline
pilots with the lives of hundreds of passengers. We pay airline pilots
as well as we do not for the hours of boredom of the average flight, but
for those few seconds when extraordinary situations require
extraordinary coolness and judgment. If you don’t trust an airline pilot
with a handgun, why would you trust them with the controls of the
airplane?

This isn’t as expensive or complex a proposal as you may think. Many
airline pilots received their flight training in the military, and have
received some handgun training. I would be startled if many airline
pilots don’t already own handguns.

The idea of the pilot shooting a terrorist onboard an airliner makes my
blood run cold. The risk of hitting a passenger in high, especially when
you consider that the pilot will almost always be shooting in the same
direction as all of his passengers, and that terrorists will almost
certainly take hostages. It is also true that a terrorist might decide
to kill the passengers one by one trying to force the pilots to give up
control of the plane, or just blow up the plane. This would mean
hundreds of deaths onboard that airliner. But of this can be sure: no
terrorist would be able to use that plane to kill thousands of people by
ramming a skyscraper. I’ll take my chances with the armed pilots, thank
you.

by Clayton Cramer 9/11/2001

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Clayton E. Cramer’s most recent book was Concealed Weapon Laws of the
Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Praeger
Press, 1999). His web page is http://claytoncramer.com.

<free to redistribute widely>

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Clayton E. Cramer Software Engineer by Day, Historian by Night
clayton.cramer@c…