Reply #28: Oh, good underwear gnomes logic there.

[Mechatanketra]

The 9/11 hijackers were just guys traveling until they took the planes into the buildings. If you want airline security, innocent people will be hassled.

Um ... the 9/11 hijackers were "just guys travelling" until they pulled out some weapons and demanded control of the plane. It's kind of a critical prerequisite to taking the planes into the buildings, and as it happens, it also neatly constitutes "probable cause" for pulling a gun on them.

And having a loaded weapon pointed at your head is not "being annoyed". It's "aggravated assault", and has an alarmingly high probability of becoming "f***ing dead for no good reason". If I'm going to be at risk of experiencing "f***ing dead for no good reason", you know what? I don't care what team jersey the guy that killed me was wearing. That airplane is, for me, less secure; at the end of the day, nobody on the plane was actually at risk of bombing, but someone WAS put in danger by the de-bombing. If one of those passengers had been unlucky enough to spook an agent into shooting, we'd have the Iraq invasion in miniature.

Real security is the golden mean between hands-off apathy and paranoid crackdown.