If pack is preferable to herd, we need claws

Bruce Hershensohn joined Bill Bennett's radio show today as a guest. In his closing remarks, about the likelihood of another terrorist attack against the US and timed to influence the general elections, he made a strong point that it will not be enough for us to survive through this period. We will have to win. We will have to prevail.

I was tracking him on this point. He continued: we will have to give Mideast terror groups a resounding defeat, so our children and grandchildren can someday enter a Federal building without having to navigate the concrete planters and metal detectors. I was tracking him even better. He wants future Americans to not have to suffer the indignities of airport searches. Wow. I liked his line of argument better still.

Then he used the word inconveniences to describe all of these antiterrorism measures that he hoped one day would no longer be necessary because of the sound defeat of the parties these measures are deployed to deter.

He lost me right there.

It is not a fscking inconvenience that I can no longer carry a folding knife aboard an aircraft, a common practice of mine and many others before the World Trade Center was leveled. We are not merely discommodated by having to either check that knife in luggage or leave it at home. A few stout folding knives, in the hands of ordinary passengers, could have turned that attack from three thousand deaths and an American economy held breathless for days, to the loss of just the plane and the souls aboard it, possibly even to recovering control of the cockpit. We've seen that ordinary people can and will do the extraordinary, even to kill themselves while foiling an attempt to convert an airliner into a cruise missile. Public policy must not interfere with people rising to the extraordinary occasion.

Public policy in this case actually prolongs our vulnerability to terror, pushing farther into the future any day when we can forklift the giant planters away from the Federal building and stop wanding grandmas in the airport, and release the TSA screeners to the economy to pursue useful work.

If instead of a terrorist capture of the plane, there is a mishap, and the crew manages to land the plane in some remote, Godforsaken country with a few souls still alive, I'll need that folding knife, and that Swiss Army knife, both regular companions of mine, whether to extract passengers from the wreckage, or break into luggage, or improvise shelter until help arrives. My fellow passengers might need them if I'm dead, and they're welcome to rummage my pockets to find them.

Giving up those knives is not a mere inconvenience, Mr. Hershensohn. It's helplessness, and nobody is made safer by being rendered helpless. This helplessness is imposed upon all of us by people who see their responsibility not in my safety, but in the smooth operation of a gigantic nation-state bent on preserving itself. We are mere resources for that state to expend; in that respect they are little better than al Qaeda sending hopeless twits to detonate themselves among us.

A critic could infer that, by my reasoning, we ought to allow people to carry guns aboard aircraft too.

Well, glad you asked: yes, we should. Not just pilots, and not just after said pilots have effectively been nationalized as Federal law enforcement officers. But we have to crawl before we can walk, walk before we can run. Restoring edged weapons would confer no disproportionate advantage to the boarding terrorist. There will be more than enough of us Retrosexuals bringing ours along again.

Letting the very cold air of reality hit every man's and woman's face will brace us as a people for the task before us. We cannot prevail as a nation, in a conflict against a stateless Islamist underworld, unless their ultimate target, the weakling, is denied them. We'll do our part, but our laws must not put obstacles before us.