Copyright 2002 Journal Sentinel Inc. Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin)
July 16, 2002 Tuesday FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 15A
LENGTH:
745 words
HEADLINE:Arm
pilots? Well ; Arm pilots? Well, duh
BYLINE: KATHLEEN PARKER Orlando Sentinel
BODY: Given the amount of energy
required for thinking, and my aptitude for staring into middle space, I confess
to an affection for no-brainers, such as: Should airline pilots carry guns?
Wait, wait, I'm tearing myself away from a mesmerizing
galaxy of dust particles to make this public service pronouncement. Terrorists
have box cutters and nefarious plans for murdering thousands by taking out
helpless pilots. Here's an idea: Let's give pilots a way to defend themselves!
OK, that's a wrap. I'm exhausted. See you next
week.
Would that life were so simple. Instead, during
more than nine months since the savage attacks of Sept. 11, we've acted as if we
checked our brains curbside.
Anyone who has flown in
recent months knows the drill: Little old ladies, comely blond women and Al Gore
get frisked and searched while government decoys carrying fake guns and bombs
slip through the gate 25% of the time, according to recent nationwide tests.
At Los Angeles International Airport, the slip-through
rate was 41%. Los Angeles, you'll recall, is where Egyptian gunman Hesham
Mohamed Hadayet mowed down two people at the El Al ticket counter on the Fourth
of July. It doesn't take much of a stretch to imagine that a madman who takes a
gun to an airport with a 41% slip-through rate could wind up on an airplane.
But not to worry; we're in safe hands. Our security folks
are on top of this one: Hadayet is Egyptian; may have terrorist ties; is
believed to have met with Osama bin Laden; is a known anti-Semite; and picked a
national U.S. holiday to attack people at the Israeli airline ticket counter.
They'll be closing in on a motive any day now.
Let's
tighten our little thinking caps a minute. Guns and bombs get through; security
checkers are busy fondling the random paying (duped) customer; pilots are
defenseless. . . . That's not an ellipsis, but the dots that need connecting.
Fortunately for those still forced by business or
circumstance to fly, some members of the House of Representatives sharpened
their pencils last week. Wednesday, the House voted 310-113 in favor of a bill
that would allow commercial pilots to sign up for an armed-pilot program.
As proposed, the program would be voluntary. Those
comfortable with the idea of having a final shot at life -- rather than being
carved up by hijackers or radically deplaned by the U.S. Air Force -- may take a
training course and lock and load.
The bill still faces
the Senate, where it isn't likely to do as well owing to fierce opposition from
key players combined with an uncharacteristically wimpy White House. Both
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge
are against arming pilots, as is John Magaw, head of the Transportation Security
Administration.
Why? I'm not sure. Dots too small?
Logic too obvious? Politics too hot? From where I sit back in coach class,
nothing is hotter than a radical, Qur'an-chanting Islamist who thinks that
killing Americans is a sacrament and that 72 virgins awaiting in heaven is a
fair trade-off for ramming an airplane into a tall building.
That's also the sort of heat a fruitcake pilot could inflict any time
the mood swings. As commander of a 400-ton missile loaded with explosive fuel, a
commercial pilot is already in charge of a significant lethal weapon. By
inserting ourselves inside said missile, we've already put our lives into his
hands. And we're worried about a gun in the cockpit?
Given a choice between trusting the screeners, whose "security
measures" would get them indicted for sexual assault in any other workplace, and
a trained, armed airline pilot, in whom I already have placed my trust, I'll go
with the latter.
In the nightmarish event that an armed
lunatic takes over my airplane, I am fundamentally not interested in handgun
control rhetoric or in slippery slope arguments that, golly, before you know it,
bus drivers and train engineers and who knows who else will want guns, too. Give
a mouse a cookie and, barring literary interference from E.B. White, he runs
away.
What I am concerned with is just one thing:
stepping over a dead hijacker as I exit my safely landed airplane. Given the
weaknesses in our current security system, arming pilots is the best insurance
we have against another slaughter like Sept. 11. Given the obvious simplicity of
this no-brainer, don't count on it.
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Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Orlando
Sentinel.
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