Quote:I don't like Dem politicians either... the reason I don't like Republicans is that they ARE Dems that use libertarian rhetoric for a month before each election (except for Ron Paul, OK...). But the Republican Administration is the one that finally, officially disarmed the airline pilots the summer before 9-11, then fought to this day (mostly successfully) to keep them from re-arming. They're not our friends.End Quote...
You are not entirely correct on this; my brother is an airline pilot and said it is the FAA and the airlines that screwed it up for pilots…
Mineta (transportation secretary) was a Clinton cabinet member holdover (anti-gun)
The bottom line is that the FAA adopted a rule back in 1987 that stopped pilots from boarding airplanes with guns, after some idiot broke into the cockpit murdered the pilots and crashed the plane…This was a changing tide since the Cuban missile crisis when pilots could be armed under FAA rules…The real culprit besides the FAA were the airlines themselves…
They never in all the years since the Cuban missile crisis applied to put the pilots through the courses necessary for the pilots to be armed…
A lot of people screwing up including pilots themselves (drinking violations, etc.)
Most pilots and some security experts say that if the airlines had taken advantage of the program that it would have never been removed…
This was a bureaucratic nightmare as are most things that the government involves itself in…
The head of the Center for the Study of Crime, Randall N. Herrst – an attorney by trade who said his arguments have been used successfully in anti-gun control cases – disagrees with the government's intention of placing sky marshals on each flight. He says arming pilots would be a better, more cost-effective and faster plan to implement.
"At 35,000 flights a day, even if some marshals can cover two round trips per day on short routes, we will still need 90,000 sky marshals if we want at least two on each flight," taking into account days off, vacations and sick days, he said.
He agreed that "there are no guarantees" armed pilots would have prevented the Sept. 11 hijackings. But he added: "That is the only course of action that could have stopped the attacks."
Herrst said arming pilots would amount to a military principle known as "defense in depth."
"If you have a choice," he says, "you never depend on a single line of defense – you always have a second, third and fourth line as well."
He is also suspicious that despite Sept. 11, lawmakers, bureaucrats and the White House are still dragging their feet over arming pilots.
"The reasons must be purely political," he told WND. "[But] if there is another major round of hijackings, it will probably bankrupt the entire U.S. airline industry."
"People are so obsessed with banning guns that they are willing to sacrifice human lives and a huge portion of our economy to political correctness," he added.