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20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

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Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#781

Post by baix777 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #759
umvi wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths It would be a highly controversial dashboard, I guarantee it, likely unpopular with both political parties. The problem is that assuaging fear is often more important (to irrational people) than saving lives. For example, guns…

> So you have all this talk of "bump stocks" and "ghost guns" and "assault weapons" and whatnot, but it's all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn't to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don't take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn't focused on handguns and suicides. It's also politics. If you actually wanted to solve the problem, well, like two thirds of US fire…

It is interesting to compare US vs Canadian suicide rates to see what impact gun ownership could have.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#783

Post by AtlasBarfed »

vowelless wrote: post #674
umvi wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths It would be a highly controversial dashboard, I guarantee it, likely unpopular with both political parties. The problem is that assuaging fear is often more important (to irrational people) than saving lives. For example, guns…

> For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings. Adjusted for how armed Americans are, gun violence in this country is tiny. And seeing what an armed citizenry can do against the full American force (Afghanistan), an armed population is a necessity against tyranny in America.

Pea shooters will allow you to stop the US Army on home soil? They have total information awareness, tanks, space/air power, snipers, GPS bombs, etc.

Afghanistan was lost because of our tolerance of corruption and intolerance for spending money on a speck of dirt. Oppression of the US will be far more worth the money to a tyranny.

If the second amendment actually said what gun people say it does (literalist/"strict constructionalist"), then I can use these arms as well:

- grenades?

- bazookas?

- artillery?

- explosives?

- chemical weapons?

- biological weapons?

- nuclear/dirtynuke weapons?

Where are you, as an apparently ardent 2nd amendment person likely living in at least a suburban population density comfortable with allowing your fellow Americans to arm themselves with?

At somewhere along that chain, almost all non-crazy 2nd amendment people "nope out" of allowing those arms. Maybe your typical gun rights person would allow grenades, MAYBE bazookas.

Major explosives or anything else? Nope.

But you'd need to get to the chem/bio/nuke arms to have any real deterrent to the US Army.

Your pea shooter militia is a fantasy. The US army has more than cannons, horses, and muskets now.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#784

Post by apples_oranges »

GhostVII wrote: post #537

We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone's time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths, while still being OK with high speed limits that kill thousand…

This is actually a logical fallacy. Heart disease, accidents etc: They happen. Terrorism: Someone wants them to happen. Big difference, think about it.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#785

Post by 908B64B197 »

dmwallin wrote: post #765
908B64B197 wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's interesting is how all these policies focus on banning legal guns. Now, try asking in a debate the proportion of crimes committed with legal weapons vs illegal weapons and watch your opponent start dancing around the question! Good luck getting a straight answer.

All these "illegal" guns started their life as brand-new perfectly legal firearms. It's a very leaky pipeline, one in which the industry and industry funded lobby groups have at least a bit of a mixed incentive to solve. The vast majority of the proposed gun-control laws focus on tightening up the leakiest parts of the supply chain, or on reducing the overall demand for various firearms.

> All these "illegal" guns started their life as brand-new perfectly legal firearms.

Citation needed here. Especially in the south.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#786

Post by 908B64B197 »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #750
908B64B197 wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's interesting is how all these policies focus on banning legal guns. Now, try asking in a debate the proportion of crimes committed with legal weapons vs illegal weapons and watch your opponent start dancing around the question! Good luck getting a straight answer.

Which is probably why the US stopped reporting on the percentage of gun crime committed with legally versus illegally obtained firearms in 2004. I bet the data is available, but you'd have to comb through court records yourself. Even at that point, "legally obtained" still included borrowing one from a friend or family member.

> Which is probably why the US stopped reporting on the percentage of gun crime committed with legally versus illegally obtained firearms in 2004

That's interesting! Why would they hide such stats?

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#787

Post by godshatter »

jjeaff wrote: post #479
hunterb123 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What are the reasons not to get a vaccine? I haven't seen any real data that indicated that.

I'm fully vaccinated, but that was a choice I made. It was a risk assessment. "How likely am I to get covid and have a bad go of it?" vs "How likely am I to have a bad reaction from the vaccine?" That's a risk assessment that varies from person to person based on where they live, what medical conditions they might have, their age, and other things.

The mRNA vaccines are especially worrisome to some because they are relatively new and aren't fully approved in the US (where I live).

I have a co-morbidity and by the time I was eligible to get vaccinated it looked obvious to me that I'd be better off getting it based on how well they were performing and how low the risk appeared. Things could have turned out wildly different with vaccines that turned out to be both mostly ineffective and potentially dangerous, causing me to assess things differently.

I encourage my friends who aren't vaccinated to get jabbed, but I have no wish to have the government force them to get a medical procedure they specifically don't want.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#788

Post by jandrese »

js2 wrote: post #694
jedberg wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government already has my fingerprints, because I had to give them to get a passport (edit: I've been informed this was only because I also did Global Entry) and also when I was in elementary school they fingerprinted everyone and also when I got my driver's license. Pretty much if you're a US citizen they already have your fingerprints.

> Pretty much if you're a US citizen they already have your fingerprints. False. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/how-app... My spouse and I renewed our passports in the last 10 years, and got our kids passports for the first time. We did not provide fingerprints. I am a U.S. citizen. I went through an SF86 clearance in the early 2000s and don't recall even that requiring my fingerprints (but I co…

There are multiple clearances with different requirements, so it is possible that certain types require finger prints while others do not. However, AFAIK everybody who gets a clearance also has their fingerprints taken. The finger prints may not be available to regular LEO for dragnets to reduce the chance of leaking out the personal information of every cleared individual to foreign agents that have infiltrated law enforcement.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#789

Post by umvi »

aeternum wrote: post #582
modzu wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when the towers fell, nobody got hurt? the threats are legitimate, but its fair to be critical of the response.

the threats are legitimate and every death counts but it also makes sense to prioritize and focus our limited attention to areas where it has the most impact. Terrorism kills something like 28k/year whereas Covid has killed 5 million.

The majority of the ~5 million that covid killed would have been dead of old age, heart disease, etc. in 5-10 years anyway. Covid just shaved off a few years of life expectancy; the same people would have shown up in CDC death counts as heart disease or natural causes statistics a few years later. With the 28k killed by terrorism, not so much. You have a lot more young and healthy dying with decades of life expectancy remaining.

Same with comparing covid deaths to WWI deaths. On the one hand you have thousands of healthy 18-year-olds dying, and on the other you have thousands of elderly, obese, and sickly people dying. Not quite a fair comparison.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#790

Post by lovegoblin »

abstractbarista wrote: post #630
newswasboring wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The target is to save lives. If the threat is still there, we need to keep the safety measures. And covid measures have always been dynamic. Safety measures have been removed or reintroduced based up on very hard statistics man. I don't know how you don't see that. edit: My first sentence was a bit garbage. The target is to save lives from covid and avoid its spread. Hospital utilization and mortality rate from the d…

That may be the target, but the real outcome is simply delaying those deaths, spreading them out more over time.

> the real outcome is simply delaying those deaths, spreading them out more over time.

Which is still a good outcome, because you don't want to overwhelm the healthcare system to the point that it can't handle anything that isn't COVID.

That was the whole point of the early-pandemic "flatten the curve" campaigns.

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