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Comment by sealeck | Hacker News Reader

This is an... interesting comment on many levels.

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...

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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.

Terrorists prefer blowing up aircraft to other things.

There have been more terrorist car bombings than plane bombings by several orders of magnitude.

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.

Now, I just wonder if it might be rare because plane crashes themselves are rare?

Lockerbie in Scotland is one quite well known instance:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103

11 residents killed by falling debris.

It happens. PSA 182 for example killed everybody on board plus seven people on the ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines_Fli...

American 587, a month after 9/11, killed five people on the ground.

> 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.

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