"Just killing passengers" isn't meaningfully worse/different than your average mall shooting... It sucks, but it's not quite as severe as turning the giant flying tube of jet fuel into an improvised ballistic missile (the 9/11 problem).
A few things: we also put lots of effort into preventing mass casualty attacks in public places around the world (except the US govt in primary schools, for unfortunate three letter political reasons that begin with N and end with A). We generally don't want people to blow up planes because they're super expensive (even if we discount the lives of the passengers). Terrorists prefer blowing up aircraft to other things. When planes crash, they often hit people on the ground. And so on...
This is wrong on many levels. There isn’t much effort put into preventing those kind of attacks outside of really dense venues like stadiums.
Train and subway stations rarely have more than one or two armed officers if they have any at all.
Train tracks have shockingly little protection to prevent timed derailment sabotage. Buildings have little protection from being surrounded by accelerants and set on fire, etc.
There is a strange subset of things terrorists seem to want to do and society doesn’t do much to prevent the rest.
I'm not sure that's relevant or comparable when there's no baseline for what terrorist means.
There are lots of reasons people bomb cars. I would bet most of those organizations (1+ individuals) would prefer to blow up planes full of specific targets over specific targets.
>When planes crash, they often hit people on the ground
Do they? Other than 9/11, I'm personally unaware of this ever happening. 20 seconds searching says there was an airplane that crashed into a DC bridge in the 80's killing 4 motorists, and a couple of similar incidents, but it seems rare.
> Terrorists prefer blowing up aircraft to other things
Seems to me a lot of terrorist attacks are blowing up buildings or driving vehicles into crowds or bombs in crowds or stuff like that. Not a ton of blowing up planes in transit in the overall list of terrorist attacks.
But TSA does nothing to prevent that. Any rando can do that from outside of the plane. The things aren’t bullet proof and tailgating a vehicle into the general aviation gate of a major airport is trivial if you don’t care about eventually being caught.
yeah but the same is pretty much true of a train or a bus, which don't require all of this TSA stuff. If you wanted to kill people for much lower effort you can just get in a car and run over pedestrians or something.
The justification for the TSA is that terrorist attacks like 9/11 could deal a disproportionate amount of damage compared to the effort needed to pull them off. But it's sort of a flawed premise because the 9/11 attacks relied on the element of surprise: the victims thought the attackers were pirates. Otherwise there's no way a couple of terrorists could fight off an entire plane with just box-cutters.
If you blow a hole in the side of a bus then the bus can come to a halt and the passengers disembark safely. Same story with a train.
If you blow a hole in the side of a plane, then no one can disembark until the plane lands, and the plane itself may simply disintegrate mid-air, killing everyone on board.
Same story if you fill the bus or train with toxic gas, or try to start shooting, or literally any other form of attempted mass casualty attack. Planes are uniquely different to all other modes of transportation because you cannot disembark them quickly and the default failure mode is everybody dies.
