>
So you also want airlines to modify cabins to handle oversized carry-on luggage?No more so than they already do. See, I routinely travel with an acoustic guitar in a gig bag as my "personal item"; it fits in the overhead compartment. And when I don't have the big guitar I often carry a smaller "travel" guitar in a triangular case that is almost exactly the size and shape of a rifle case; they often let me hang that one in the coat closet to get it out of the way.
The problem here isn't that I want to carry a rifle on board, it's that I want other people to be free to carry a rifle on board. I want that because preventing them from doing so inflicts a cost on me. Preventing things like rifles means I need to get to the airport an hour before the flight and I need to stand in long security lines and let them grope and/or ogle me and search my baggage and confiscate my sunscreen and examine my guitar and send my electronics through a second time. Every. Single. Flight.
If I could skip all that nonsense - just come to the airport and walk right to the gate WITHOUT the search, that would worth at least an extra 5 or 10 bucks to me because it substantially reduces the chance that I'll miss my flight. And it would SAVE the airline money not having to pay for search goons and their equipment, and it would even make me more likely to fly.
I want other people to be able to carry a rifle because I'm not a hoplophobe. In fact, I personally would feel ever-so-slightly safer in a flight where I knew other people might be armed as a matter of default than in one where the ONLY armed people are likely to be bad guys or Official Security. Because I trust that on average, by and large, my fellow passengers are competent and well-meaning people. They're not ALL potential terrorists; any potential terrorists are seriously outnumbered and (in my world) outgunned.
I just want to get on the damn plane without the time-wasting rigamarole.
Have you ever gone skydiving? If so, did you notice that there's no airport security there - you don't have to take off your shoes and helmets and put the parachute through a metal detector? You just put on all your crap, get on the plane with it and the plane takes off. Right then and there. You can do this at small airports all over the country, using decent sized planes. And somehow nobody has ever used this as an opportunity to kick everyone out, hijack the plane and crash it into a building.
The specific threat that modern "airport security" is designed to stop is essentially nonexistent. We are fighting an imaginary hobgoblin, an empty set. The money we spend doing so is entirely wasted other than that it makes a few people feel more confident to think that we're "doing something".
We should address the same fear some other way. Maybe if we put up billboards and ran ads explaining why all the security theater makes us less safe, people would stop demanding it.