Quote:
Originally posted by Warphead
I'm a big fan of harsh humor, but kids get suspended for joking about going on a shooting spree. You'd think med students (as one's sister mentioned not less than 42 times) would be a little smarter. Especially in the south, those guys bring guns to bingo.
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Yes, a case of terminal stupidity. Like not using profiling for selecting people for extra screening before boarding an airliner.
And actually, profiling is already happening, even though it is particularly stupid profiling.
Because my daughter is an airline employee, I can R/T anywhere in the Southwest Airlines system for about $65, but the tickets I use are standby tickets, which are, by definition, one-way tickets.
Well, the Sourthwest computer sees anyone using cheap one-way tickets as a particular threat. (This is because terrorists are very frugal and wouldn't spend the extra money on a R/T, right?)
Anyway, if 100 people are getting on the plane and they pull 3 or 4 out for special attention, 80%-90% of the time I'm one of them.
Before someone mentions Tim McVeigh or the fact that a 90 year old great-grandmother in a wheelchair could conceivably be a terrorist, let's get real.
You can't screen everybody (even though that's what I understand they do in Israel, which hasn't had a hijacking in quite some time). The money to do screenings and the resources for doing it are limited, so one must use these resources intelligently, which doesn't mean politically correctly.
As long as it's not just logically possible but seemingly more likely that Middle Easter Muslim males will hijack a plane than a military veteran with a crew-cut or a granny in a wheelchair, it just makes more sense to pay more attention to them. Hijacking planes is their MO at the moment.
But, no, Southwest almost invariably makes sure that on this, my 65th trip with them, I still have no explosives in my suitcase.
I hope you all feel safer.