I hear Ralph was good with a knife.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who uttered the title above, would have loved the Federal government, for which consistency in logic or policy is often alien indeed. In the midst of a mass effort to disarm the American people of guns with the dubious logic and arrogant presumption that they don’t need powerful weaponry since, after all, the government will save us, the TSA, it has been revealed to me by my observant son, has secretly adopted exactly the opposite position, using polar reasoning.
My son, who likes knives almost as much as he likes guns, showed me several potential weapons in his collection that would legally pass through the new air travel regulations. He notes that officials defending the lifting of the ban on blades that could do as much damage as the box cutters of 9/11 have pointed to the self-reliance of air passengers, who have subdued several mid-air threats. “Don’t you get it?” my son says. “They’re arming passengers! They won’t say that directly, but it’s pretty obvious. The passengers on Flight 93 had to boil water and use food carts. Now hijackers might be facing a hundred angry people with knives.”
I get it! An armed and ready populace is a good thing! When the government says so, that is. So…. it makes sense to arm untrained air passengers when they face a deadly threat without police nearby, but schools should be “gun free zones” and it’s nuts to arm untrained teachers…indeed, trained and law-abiding gun owners should be disarmed lest they shoot Harvey Milk. I hearby predict that the little knife policy will last until a child gets killed by a mad airplane coach passenger wielding one, whereupon President Obama will invoke his “save just one child” rule, Rep. Rangel will declare that millions of children are being killed by little knives, and Jim Carrey will tweet that nobody who cares about children would oppose a little knife ban. The knives will then be not only prohibited again on airplanes, but will be confiscated by edict, since there’s no Bill of Rights provision protecting little knife ownership.
The behavior of our elected officials is consistent after all.
Emerson’s quote applies perfectly.
Ethics Alarms 
Why isn’t a knife an arm? True, it’s not a firearm, but if an arm is a weapon, which is how my dictionary defines it, a knife is still an arm and subject to second amendment protection, although I would not expect to see demonstrators marching with placards procliaming “Ban the Blade.”
I think you’re probably right, but it has yet to be tested in court, at least that I can find.
Which is the TSA admitting that they have no ability to actually stop the bad actors from getting on a plane in the first place.
They might as well have said “Look, we are incompetent as fuck, so you people need to bring some knives, because you are on your fucking own.”
TSA is a terrible waste of tax money and doesn’t add anything to our safety. Bloated bureaucracy, I’d rather return to the only the agencies we had before it, adding cost and idiocy but nothing of value.
That would have been better than “we’re trying to stop bombs, not protect stewards and passengers.” Probably more popular too.
Well, the stabbing in Target may have decided it. Either that, or people will use the stabbing as an example of why we need to ban assault weapons (was it Koch or Dinkins in NYC who made that argument once?).
Don’t laugh – in the UK, they’ve banned stabbing instruments…
Reblogged this on The Patriot Perspective and commented:
It’s right there in … plane… sight.
What they need to do is let everone carry pistols on board but also change the seating arrangemnt so its just benchs facing each other. That way no one has their back to anyone and everyone has each other in sight.
THAT sounds comfy!!!
Jack, you didn’t mention the fact that now one can bring the “toy” baseball bats (wooden ones — that are given out at special baseball games) onto planes as well. While they may be small, they can be great weapons, are easier to use than hockey sticks (which are large and unwieldy), and a good whack with a wooden baseball bat (even a small one) can disarm or really hurt another person.
The concept that TSA is protecting against bombers and that passengers and flight attendants are “on their own” is probably true. Bring on the bats and knives, I say. Support the flight attendants. Be in a position to protect yourself or subdue a threat. On an airplane especially, one can’t run away, can one?
I live in a conceal-and-carry state, and though I haven’t gotten a gun yet, just might consider it, the way things are going. If the Administration has its way, the only people who will be armed are policemen, the military, and the CRIMINALS. Though I wouldn’t be one to carry a gun, I might like one by my bed, as the apparent profusion of home invasions grows. (A local policeman told me that ADT is the worst of the systems, and to find a different one, just FYI.)
The post-9/11 cockpit door designs and rules probably have a lot more to do with it than the idea of arming the passengers. The fact is, it is no longer possible for terrorists to take over a plane with small knives (or novelty mini baseball bats), because you cannot break through a locked metal door with a two-inch blade.
I’m not going to defend the TSA, which I think is often ridiculous. But in this particular instance, they’re right. A small knife blade will not enable anyone to take over a plane anymore; therefore it is a pointless inconvenience to passengers to not allow them to take their knives on planes. Especially since many small knives are just part of what people carry around (for instance, in a swiss army knife or on a keychain) on a day to day basis.
Someone reads Bruce Schneier: “Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.” http://www.schneier.com/news-072.html
This isn’t an arming of passengers, this is an undoing of a governmental mistake: a useless and unnecessary knee-jerk response to a terrible occurrence.
There is nothing inconsistent with removing a ban on utility knives and desiring limits on firearms.