Guess what? The TSA bans on liquids and gels is probably completely ineffective at stopping terrorists from getting bomb-making materials aboard plains. Admittedly, the new rules do make it harder by forcing the terrorist to bring along a child, but the practice of dumping all of the potentially explosive liquids into big trash bins in the middle of crowded airport checkpoints isn’t exactly the brightest idea either…
Aside
To be clear, I’m not coming forward with a better idea (except perhaps that the trash should be emptied more frequently). The British approach of allowing no carry-ons whatsoever is the right one if you want to stop liquids from getting aboard, but it is incredibly disruptive. As we joked at work today, the only thing left is to demand that the passengers remove all of their clothes as well — incredibly disruptive, incredibly unlikely, but also pretty darn effective, if your only goal is to stop a potential terrorist threat to bring weaponizable material aboard an aircraft. I guess the problem I see is that this latest tactic seems like just so much more security theater that will be just as ineffective as all the new technology and manpower we’ve already deployed to stop terrorism aboard commercial jetliners. The terrorists can see what we’re doing just as plainly as anyone else can, and so their next plot will just try a different approach.
Would the NRA theory work? Stop the Air Marshall program, don’t search anyone unless they fit your basic profiling (wearing a ski jacket with wires poking out of it in the middle of July in Tucson) but hand out cudgels to everyone as they board. One or two cudgel murders a year, a few dozen bruises/broken limbs, how many succesful airline hijackings a year?