At 08:45 AM 9/23/01 -0400, you wrote:
>Excuse me, but I have to speak out on this one. I think a collection of
>unarmed passengers have a better chance of taking out terrorists armed
>with knives, than a collection of passengers sparsely armed with guns but
>mostly unarmed would have of taking out terrorists with guns. Guns are
>one of the great equalizers of battles. It seems to me that if I'm on a
>plane, I want the situation to remain as unequal as possible, i.e. 200
>passengers, five terrorists. I do not want guns or even tasers to drop
>down from the ceiling. A policy of keeping everyone down to the level of
>fists and/or knives seems like a fine policy to me - as long as it works.
>If there's only one gun on the plane and the pilot has it, anyone who can
>get that gun away from the pilot has a considerably better chance of
>taking over the plane, or at least of killing a lot more passengers before
>finally being ripped apart by teeth and fingernails. And airline
>enforcement of a gun-free environment has apparently been pretty effective
>so far; the last batch of terrorists had to make do with box cutters. So
>this is not *totally* nonsensical in the usual "harms the lawabiders but
>not the lawbreakers" sense.
>
>-- -- -- -- --
>Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
>Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Enforce the ban on guns except for those with proper ID and proof of
qualification. A few dozen "volunteer" sky marshals that cost the airline
and the government nothing on every flight would end the possibility of
anyone repeating 9/11. The volunteers could be issued weapons deemed safe
for the aircraft in exchange for their normal carry gun, which would be
checked for the flight at the security station.
'Nuff said.
Chuck Kuecker
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:55 MDT