The shooting at the Fort Lauderdale airport last week has the media once again asking the wrong questions. Take this moron for example. His little article is asking whether or not air travelers should still be allowed to have declared firearms in their checked luggage. What would a prohibition against firearms in checked luggage accomplish? It would serve to punish people like myself who often have firearms in their checked luggage but it would do absolutely nothing to enhance security (since, if you want to attack an airport, you can still drive to it with your personal vehicle).
This is the trend amongst the media. Since most reports are clueless about the topics they’re reporting on they ask idiotic questions and make equally idiotic suggestions. I’ve heard a lot of people suggest establishing security checkpoints to get into the airport so you can go through the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint. Of course, when somebody shoots up the checkpoint to get into the airport there will be demands for a checkpoint to get near the airport so you can go through the checkpoint to get into the airport so you can go through the TSA checkpoint. If we listened to these yokels it would be checkpoints all the way down.
If you haven’t already, the next time you go through a TSA checkpoint pay attention to how many people are in line with you and how tightly packed together you all are. You’ll probably notice that there are quite a few people packed into a small space. Concentrations of people are a byproduct of security checkpoints and concentrations of people are tempting targets. There’s always going to be a beginning checkpoint where the line of people remain in an insecure area and that line will be vulnerable.
Adding a checkpoint to guard a checkpoint just moves the vulnerability to a different location. What’s needed to guard against threats like the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting is a decentralized force in the insecure area of the airport. Yes, I’m talking about armed personnel. An important part of any security model is an ability to respond to a failure. Insecure areas are always a problem in a security model but even a secure area needs personnel able to respond to a checkpoint failure. So long as the nearest force able to respond to an attack are minutes away an attacker will have a period of free reign. If people really want to harden airports they need to look at both allowing staff members to carry concealed weapons and/or hiring armed private security personnel.