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    BobbySeriousAlex Pareene
    3/22/16 12:15pm

    Yes, more guns, more security stops. This has proven to stop terrorism in exactly zero places.

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      toothpetardBobbySerious
      3/22/16 12:16pm

      Jobs: created.

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      ImjustacavemanBobbySerious
      3/22/16 12:18pm

      How many terror attacks have we had at US airports?

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    XrdsAlumAlex Pareene
    3/22/16 12:26pm

    The problem here isn’t the basic idea, it’s context and execution. Israeli airport security works like this, with perimeter screening of vehicles, but they live under constant terrorist threat in a way Americans just don’t. More importantly, they have trained professionals and actual soldiers doing the first-line screening outside the airport, not the poorly trained rent-a-cops the TSA started to hire under Chertoff.

    I remember an article from years ago about the head of Israel’s airport security touring U.S. airports. He was horrified by the half-assed (but fully inconvenient) measures that turned the security lines into soft targets. He pointed out that even if the machines detected a bomb there was no armored box to dump it in. This was also under Chertoff.

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      Armando stillettoXrdsAlum
      3/22/16 12:54pm

      Testing for explosives before you enter the concourse would be more efficient. It needn’t be any more complex than a revolving door system at the entrance with a fan, vacuum and detector. It might take 5-10 seconds to permit adequate “sniffing”, but that’s a small price if it keeps the bomber from surrounding himself with targets.

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      XrdsAlumArmando stilletto
      3/22/16 12:58pm

      If that tech was available, it would also reduce the security waits inside the concourse. But an element of security theater would be lost, and that’s always been more important to someone like Chertoff.

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    toothpetardAlex Pareene
    3/22/16 12:13pm

    It’s important as many people as possible witness the spectacle of what it means to finally be safe.

    http://www.kiro7.com/news/heres-why…

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      RobNYCtoothpetard
      3/22/16 12:27pm

      I’m just sucking it up and paying the $80 bucks or whatever to get prescreened and avoid that shit.

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      toothpetardRobNYC
      3/22/16 12:27pm

      My fave is the full scan I get for dropping my kid off or picking him up. Can’t be too safe.

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    ArdenAlex Pareene
    3/22/16 12:18pm

    We must completely alter our society to accommodate this thing that happens with less statistical likelihood than getting struck by lightning during a shark attack. No measure is too small, no change can be too great. We shall move mountains for this purpose.

    Children getting a hold of guns and shooting the nearest living thing though, that’s impossible to prevent, stop complaining, why do you hate Freedom?

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      TRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)Alex Pareene
      3/22/16 12:18pm

      No major infrastructure has been destroyed. Dozens are dead, and that is a tragedy, but in the great scheme of things it is only a awful tragedy, not a setback to Belgium as a nation.

      It is cruel, but people like Mr. Chertoff are endowed with the public’s trust so that they may think in those callous terms, so that they may weigh the good of the nation against dozens of tragic dead. To so promptly and ineffectually panic at this attack is to concede this day to the forces of hate before the sun has even set.

      Mr. Chertoff is a greedy coward who would immediately exploit this tragedy for monetary gain. Yet this is the man we had leading our internal security. This is the man we tapped to write the USA PATRIOT Act. This man is our foolishness and our destruction.

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        butcherbakertoiletrymakerTRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)
        3/22/16 12:54pm

        Doesn’t Chertoff have some kind of criminal conviction on his record? Or, am I thinking about the other guy?

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        mawsim3TRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)
        3/22/16 12:57pm

        Let us suppose that Belgium were to suffer a serious train crash that would leave 26 fatalities and many injured. It would be an “awful tragedy, not a setback to Belgium as a nation.” How do you think the Belgians would react? Would they just assume that it was a freak occurrence, and not alter anything? or would they try to get down to the bottom of things and try to figure out what happened and how to prevent it in the future?

        Radical Islam has declared war on the West. More attacks are coming. The threat needs to be addressed.

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      skefflesAlex Pareene
      3/22/16 12:27pm

      Wouldn’t pushing the envelope back mean that a lot of smaller crowds become an even larger and less easily protected crowd? That is pretty much what closing the gates already did, turned small amounts of people into larger amounts of people. To be honest, we are actually lucky that AQ and ISIS seem to have such a fascination with planes, there sure are a lot of much more vulnerable targets they would be better off hitting (and we would obviously be worse off than we are).

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        Lighticeskeffles
        3/22/16 1:03pm

        Any location anywhere with a large concentration of people and few escape routes works for terrorists. It’s not that they’re all that obsessed with planes, attacks on planes make a tiny minority of all the terror attacks worldwide, it’s that the security machinery is making them such a big deal in the name of placebo on the public hysteria.

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        Srynersonskeffles
        3/22/16 4:19pm

        Yes, I read a great article probably 10+ years ago that noted the United States has been extremely lucky in that the terrorist groups it faces are overwhelmingly dumb and focused more on spectacle than results. Actual smart terrorists could inflict vastly more damage on the U.S. economy in ways that really aren’t preventable at all. (For example, why doesn’t AQ/ISIS just call in daily bomb threats against flights that are scheduled to soon depart from various major airports? This would pretty rapidly lead to either a complete shutdown of air travel or force airports to start ignoring bomb threats.)

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      IskaralPustAlex Pareene
      3/22/16 12:19pm

      The solution is obviously a voucher system for private jets. Our public airport security system is failing, so we need each citizen to have a “Transportation Empowerment Account” that they can use to install a home airport, or reinvest in new transportation technologies such as human cannons. Government bureaucracy is inherently wasteful, and only competitive unregulated flights by amateur pilots can prevent the kind of disaster we’re seeing in Europe.

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        Willow AnneIskaralPust
        3/22/16 1:36pm

        Tell me more about the “Human Cannonball” transit solution?

        Is there a hub at work for return-firing me home?

        +1 would use.

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        IskaralPustWillow Anne
        3/22/16 1:48pm

        At work there is just a giant vertical trampoline that bounces you back home, you do all your work in the air during transit. And since your adrenaline will be pumping throughout, the production efficiency increases will be yuuge, the biggest. We’ll also save tremendously on health care costs, because most diseases lack the power of flight. No more of that liberal nonsense about maternity leave or education funding either, constant high-velocity travel will keep the babies stuck in the womb where they belong.

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      ReverandRichardWayneGaryWayneAlex Pareene
      3/22/16 12:22pm

      I wholeheartedly agree. But why stop at the airport entrance? Let’s push the security envelope all the way to the front doors of our homes! Imagine how safe we’ll be once we have to wait in line for 30-40 minutes simply to leave the house, passing through a full body scanner (and, if we are carrying anything suspicious, a full body cavity search) right before we leave the porch!

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        cruise-controllerReverandRichardWayneGaryWayne
        3/22/16 12:43pm

        Then TSA will strip us naked and put us on TSA buses that bring us directly to our flights. Your clothes will be handed back to you when you land.

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        ReverandRichardWayneGaryWaynecruise-controller
        3/22/16 12:47pm

        That’s a doubleplussgood plan if I ever heard one.

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      Armando stillettoAlex Pareene
      3/22/16 12:22pm

      Chertoff has always been an amoral opportunist. His venality no longer surprises.

      The author makes the better point: What is the TSA thinking of when they herd together a mass of individuals with unscreened luggage?

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        ReverandRichardWayneGaryWayneArmando stilletto
        3/22/16 12:38pm

        But of course the answer is to move that soft target a couple of yards further from the concourses. Because, uh, terrorists won’t be able to find them?

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      HanoumatoiAlex Pareene
      3/22/16 1:49pm

      I, my wife, and our 19 month old son were going on a trip to visit my parents in January. After swabbing my hands, they flagged me as a potential threat. Ok, stupid, but whatever. Then they asked me which bags I had packed. I pointed out that I had packed parts of all of them. They got very upset at me and kept asking which of my wife and my bags were mine. I informed them that I had stuff in all of them and had packed parts of all of them (true!) They then picked a couple of the bags and brought me over, leaving my wife and son, and a couple other bags.

      So either they didn’t think I was a threat, in which case they were just wasting all of our time instead of checking other people, or they did think I was a threat, but just couldn’t be arsed to fucking do their jobs and check all the things I had packed.

      Either way, I came away very annoyed at the security theatre. If they had at least checked all of us and all our stuff I would have thought “ok maybe they detected something”, but instead they just came off lazy and disinterested.

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