TSA union calls for armed guards at every checkpoint | Hacker News Reader

TSA union calls for armed guards at every checkpoint

usatoday.com

38 pointssehrope83 comments

The next logical step is to expand the scope of the TSA's security—put full body scanners at the airport entrances rather than boarding gates. In the distant future, we can look forward to having periodic security checkpoints when we go out to get some lunch.

Not what the OP is talking about, but I hope the conversation doesn't veer in this direction.

Is this the first TSA casualty? Perhaps these odds aren't so bad after all. Maybe we don't need to overreact and restructure all security just yet.

You haven't heard that they're already collecting data on anyone who books a flight? Supposedly so they can clear them in advance. At least metaphorically, what you're worrying about here has already come to pass.

why stop there and not have security checkpoints outside every home,apartment and office building? better yet- let's have every man woman and child followed by a security officer 24/7. this will solve not only security but also unemployment. and if we still are not safe and we still have large unemployment let's have security officers assigned to security officers.

The next step for the Transportation Security Administration is to be at every transportation checkpoint. They've already experimented with that, but I assume the only reason they haven't moved faster with that is because they haven't received the necessary budget, and there may have been some local outrage where it happened.

But don't for a minute think they haven't thought about expanding themselves like that, and that they won't keep trying.

Look up 'VIPR teams'. They have already started doing operations at bus and train stations. If you live in the US you might want to talk to your government representatives if you feel uncomfortable with living in a police state, as it's damn close to being in one if not already there.

the tsa has never been about security - it staffs its checkpoints with rude incompetent dimwits. the actual agenda is and has always been smuggling.

some crazy person can pull out a gun _anywhere_ you go. that does not mean that there needs to be armed guards everywhere. "why do we have an armed guard at this coffee shop?" "oh, some dude got shot here 6 months back."

The next logical step is to expand the scope of the TSA's security

Your sarcasm is spot on. The first time I flew after 9/11 and had to stand in a 4 hour line to try to get through security I thought to myself, "If the terrorists want to get us, why don't they just kill people waiting in the security line?" Which obviously means we need a checkpoint before the checkpoint. Which makes that first checkpoint a target, so we'll need a checkpoint before that one and then it's checkpoints all the way down.

Beyond that, the fact that a crazed lunatic armed to the teeth could only kill 1 person in a crowded airport before being shot by police kind of says that there was adequate security in place already. What does the TSA want - the ability to stun everyone in a 300 meter radius anytime someone looks at them funny?

Don't give them any ideas.

This scenario was discussed on Bruce Schneier's blog many times. He's also held a competition for unlikely terrorism scenarios that would warrant banning more everyday objects.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/sixth_movie-p...

Agreed. Your checkpoint after checkpoint statements reminded me of recursion :) Recursive Checkpoints check you all the way to home!

Why not this: You book a flight. Then when the day of your departure comes, an armoured van with 3 paramedics, 15 SWAT officers, a dog unit and a team of anaesthesiologists come to your house, put you to sleep, load you in a crate, then you spend the entire trip to the airport asleep, along with your entire flight and you only wake up at your destination. Hopefully your luggage wasn't misplaced and neither were you. You're required to fast for at least 2 days before a long flight, since bedpans aren't provided. For short trips, only chloroform is administered. Waking up in the middle of flight is a federal crime.

I think I'd actually like that... I've always found travelling to be the worst part of going on vacation. :)

Stunning won't cut it, they should be able to shoot at sight.

Someone may be pulling out a pack of skittles while making a lunging movement.

Well of course, that's definitely what we need guns, guns, more guns, everywhere.

So now when the TSA makes a mistake, it will be a deadly mistake.

Or why even bring a gun to the airport when you can just take one from a poorly trained TSA agent.

Or we could dissolve the TSA and homeland security theater while we are at it.

While I agree with your sentiment, the TSA agents are not the ones to be packing heat. They are asking for more local police presence.

"The screeners, who earn up to $30,000 annually, have not requested to carry guns themselves, but they do want an armed security officer present at every checkpoint, Cox said."

Armed security officer is not the same as a police officer.

I'd prefer to see armed citizens myself.

There are already plenty of armed citizens in the US. If this incident follows precedent, gun sales will have spiked dramatically.

Those armed citizens are not allowed in airports by law. There's a reason airports, along with schools, post offices, the state of California, etc, are called 'victim disarmament zones' by the concealed-carry crowd.

I've heard that argument. For me, it breaks down in that it assumes there's a correlation between the number of people carrying guns, and the number of responsible people carrying guns who will actually react properly when something happens.

I've yet to hear of a lunatic trying to shoot up a police station, a gunshop, or a firing range - places where guns are prevalent. Also, Israel arms their teachers[1] and school shootings have 'magically' gone way down. I'd like to think that the deterrent effect would play a significant role in keeping our kids and ourselves safe, aka the "an armed society is a polite society" argument.

[1] - http://www.examiner.com/article/arming-teachers-worked-for-i...

Your examples are irrelevant because they're controlled environments - in a gun shop most of the guns are locked up behind bulletproof glass. The police make certain they're the only ones with guns inside a police station. And nobody would be stupid enough to start something in a place where people are practicing shooting targets with already loaded weapons.

The point about the teachers is a good one - though culturally and politically I don't know if that would work very well in the United States. But to be fair to your point, we would have to also allow the students to carry guns to protect themselves against the teachers, who now represent an oppressive and violent arm of the state after all, and we're down to the same problem - how does one tell the difference between a trustworthy, armed person and an untrustworthy armed person?

> Or we could dissolve the TSA and homeland security theater while we are at it.

excellent idea. i fucking hate the tsa and couldn't possibly give a shit about one of their ppl getting killed after all the bullshit i have had to go through just to travel in the US.

> i fucking hate the tsa and couldn't possibly give a shit about one of their ppl getting killed

I sincerely hope that someday you will be ashamed for writing this.

>> i fucking hate the tsa and couldn't possibly give a shit about one of their ppl getting killed >I sincerely hope that someday you will be ashamed for writing this.

i'm sure the tsa sheds a dramatic native american tear every time they hear about someone else getting injured or killed on the job. people die every day and the fact that it's a member of the tsa changes the general feeling of indifference into amusement because the tsa actively reduces the quality of my life on a regular basis.

if it was me that died and all you know is that i'm some member of a group that is generally shitty to you on a regular basis, i don't think you're going to be all emo about it. grow up

There's a huge difference between not feeling particularly emotionally upset by the fact of someone you don't know dying, and saying that you "couldn't possibly give a shit" about someone's death because the organization that employed that person has given you a hassle. It's true, I wouldn't feel particularly emotionally impacted by your death (people die every second). But, if you were intentionally murdered for belonging to a group that was "generally shitty" to me on a regular basis, I would still never say that I didn't "give a shit" about your murder.

I very much dislike the TSA and can't remember any positive experiences with them. Murdering TSA agents is absolutely wrong.

Just for some inside baseball American politics, when the TSA was set up, the deal was that the Republicans wanted to be seen doing something about law and order and the Democrats wanted a huge new block of unionized civil service workers.

The interesting question is: which of these political rationales will hold and which won't? Will there be a backlash against another union voice working in their own interests more than the flying public? (After all, nobody wants shootings at airports, why arm TSA workers and not, say, baggage clerks?) Will there be a backlash against the entire idea of the TSA as being necessary for safety?

My money says that neither of these will happen. Both rationales will hold up fine, and American airports will continue to look more and more like prison camps instead of places to celebrate our ability to freely travel. By having conflicting and complementary rationales for existence, no matter what happens, the overall response from the media and the political system will be "We need more TSA"

I dunno, it could cut the other way too. In addition to the usual complaints about restricting freedom, if I were looking to build conservative opposition to the TSA I'd shout from the rooftops that they're a heavily unionized, heavily minority (45%) workforce.

And you'd fall into a larger narrative between the parties that has nothing to do with TSA.

That's the beauty of the way this was set up: we got the TSA because it fits into the larger strategies both parties already have in place. You can't attack it directly without just diving into good old domestic politics, which in practice means that the agency is impervious to scrutiny.

So sure, take a shop-worn argument from the right and shout it from the rooftops. It'll just blend in with the rest of the clamor.

I've not known conservatives to say, "hey, there's a bunch of minorities working in occupation X, we're aganst it."

Note that a mass casualty event at a checkpoint, where hundreds of people are concentrated, standing around exposed, hasn't prompted called to eliminate that structure for checkpoints.

That is, when the scenario I have seen predicted by security experts critical of the TSA comes true, the TSA makes no comment at all about the fact that they created this security problem in the first place.

We surely need checkpoints before those checkpoints to counter that threat.

> Note that a mass casualty event at a checkpoint, where hundreds of people are concentrated, standing around exposed, hasn't prompted called to eliminate that structure for checkpoints.

that an incident like you describe hasn't happened is an indication of the fact that terrorism is really a spectre and not a real threat. dumb people will claim "this hasn't happened because the nsa/cia/etc catches all the bad guys!".

How about actual police officers, instead of the Dominos Pizza Box Brigade we have now?

This gets at the big problem with arming TSA agents. Even well-trained police officers with decades of range practice screw up from time to time.

The belief that police officers are necessarily well-trained is overstated. I wanted to be a cop for a while and I went through police training. I'm sure it varies by jurisdiction and that many agencies have their own stricter standards, but basic standards for police marksmanship aren't very high.

Based on the training I experienced, I'd expect the average police officer to be able to hit a stationary, isolated man-sized target with a pistol most of the time from up to 75 feet.

I didn't say all police officers are well-trained.

I know. It's just a widespread belief that police officers are usually skilled marksmen who are vastly more skilled in the use of firearms than say... the average civilian gun owner. I want to make it clear that this is not the case; police firearms training is usually fairly basic.

I would have thought that the quality of police is measured not in their ability to shoot and hit something, but in their ability to refrain from doing so.

Your equaling of “well-trained police” with “police marksmanship” is a bit frightening.

Well, in this case, I meant "well-trained in marksmanship", but your point is valid. Training in marksmanship was inadequate; training in verbal de-escalation was almost nonexistent.

How is that frightening? Knowing the proper situation to use a firearm is obviously paramount, but I'd rather cops also be accurate after the decision to use a gun is made.

Even well-trained police officers with decades of range practice screw up from time to time.

And those officers are basically mythical creatures. The average cop spends very little time at the range. For example, in Florida it is typically twice a year, averaging less than 15 hours annually.

http://www.policeone.com/Officer-Safety/articles/3738401-Pol...

The next time you stand up for your dignity before the TSA, remember that there are armed guards ready to shoot.

I don't think they want guns so they can shoot the people who complain about having to get patted down.

That's not the point. Just having an armed guy in a uniform standing there will have the effect of intimidating passengers further, even if no guns are ever fired.

That's valid, but there are already armed guards and officers in airports. An argument could be made that more guns would be overkill (pun unintended) but I don't know that it would necessarily increase the intimidation factor significantly, would it?

Well it depends on a few things. Are the guards standing at the checkpoints, or just wandering around on patrol? Are they armed with handguns or assault rifles?

For what it's worth, I did not notice a police presence or armed guards the last time I flew out of LGA (a week ago).

Intimidation doesn't work like that.

Why is it intimidation if TSA agents want to be able to protect themselves from potential harm but it isn't intimidation if other people want to exercise the same right to arm themselves against potential intruders, or the state?

You're thinking about things from the TSA's perspective, think about it from the traveller's perspective: they are waiting in line, knowing full well that all of this shoe taking off and public cavity searching is unnecessary, and now they have the added knowledge that if they complain there is a man standing nearby with a gun.

I'm thinking about it from the perspective of a TSA agent as a human being who may want to be able to defend themselves against attack like anyone else.

Why should travelers not be armed then? I walk into an airport with no weapons at all, no ability to defend myself from an attack. In fact the purpose of the checkpoints, in theory, is to ensure that travelers are unarmed.

>Why should travelers not be armed then?

One practical reason is that no one else can parse the motives of someone walking armed into an international airport until they start shooting or don't. At least cops and (maybe, maybe not) the TSA agents are supposed to have them, and be trained to use them, and trustworthy not to start murdering people.

So.. either everyone can carry everything they want anywhere they like and we all just hope for the best or else an attempt is made to restrict weapons only to those known (theoretically) to be lawful actors.

I don't think the TSA will rest until all of their "agents" are precisely the main character in the game "Papers, Please."

Here's what I gathered from the article. In a busy airport like LAX, only 5 people total were shot. The gunman had a note that he specifically targeted the TSA. Out of the 5, 3 were TSA and 2 civilians. If LAX was busy, or not even, it would stand to reason there were far more civilians he could've shot but didn't. Why he even bothered with those 2 is anyone's guess, at least according to the note he left.

The subject of the note can be read one of 2+ ways. Either he's batshit insane and none of his reasoning is sound or he's not quite insane and his reasoning pushed him to believe that killing people was for a beneficial good. People in general don't really wake up wanting to murder, nor do they want to murder a very specific target. Whatever his justification to himself, it was enough to spur him into action. Premeditated by the supposed fact that the gun was bought legally.

The acts surrounding this incident do not mirror real terror like the recent rise in school shootings, yet the TSA is clearly looking to illicit the same level of sympathy. I call bullshit. Is it egregious that one person lost their life? Sure. Is this an act of terrorism? That's an extremely hard sell in light of the note he wrote. If anything he wanted to terrorize the TSA only, because its hard to believe he didn't have a "target rich environment" of civilians in a busy airport like LAX. One could reason that any shooting is an act of terror but that notion never seemed to exist before 9/11. People kill others with guns daily in this country, so what makes this any different?

Take this hypothetical: if the TSA didn't exist, would this shooting have ever taken place? I say no. The TSA will never look at themselves as a source of FUD, propaganda, or terrorism but the reaction from this person shouldn't be taken lightly, either. Yet it is. Instead of having clear reflection on how to mitigate this from happening again, they're going in the direction of provoking it! What. The. Fuck. Are. These. People. Smoking? And no, I do not want any of the batshit insane in my pipe, please.

But who will guard the guards who are guarding the guards?

There are guards all the way down.

I'd rather have turtles.

The guns will. They magically make everything safe.

They'll stand in a circle.

Wow. This is the same logic that got us to having the TSA to begin with.

Of course, normal human reaction. And of course, nothing can go wrong with a nervous & not-so-well trained TSA agent with an armed guard at his beck and call at an airport-checkpoint; where people tend to be stressed out under already-existing conditions unrelated to TSA.

I'm looking at my crystal-ball. I'll tell you what's going to happen next. Someone, a minority I'm sure, will be killed for looking/acting suspicious. Obama will give some kind of speech that we should all just learn to get along. Hateful comments will be all over the 'net for a few weeks. Protests will happen, but will be halted because I'm sure protests are not okay at airports. So the protests will happen somewhere else. The TSA agent and/or armed-guard will not be found guilty of murder, but he'll quit his job because of all the hateful/death-threats messages he gets. A 2nd tragic event will happen in an American airport involving TSA/armed-guard. This 2nd incident will be much more serious because this time the victim won't be a brown person; nobody cares about them anyways. It'll be a white, Russian or Asian person. They'll stop having armed guards after this 2nd incident. The TSA will be renamed or moved away from the checkpoint areas they are at now; to be right in front of the door to the jetway. But then, something bad will happen again, people will say it's too crowded and panic-prone for that location to have TSA.... they'll be moved back to the previous checkpoints, unarmed. This whole cycle will repeat or someone will just shutdown the TSA, like they should have done ......in the beginning[1]

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybRrbNjWW3k&t=6m58s

To me, the real issue is, is this a frequent enough problem that really needs addressing. I don't believe it is.

Terrorism wasn't a frequent enough problem to justify the TSA in the first place. Whether or not its a real problem is irrelevant to the people making the power grabs.

Who decided it was a good idea to let the TSA unionize?!

Right--the problem here is actually unions and not whatever we were thinking.

Every TSA checkpoint I've ever been through has had an armed police officer there. So what's this "call for armed guards"?

The armed guards are local police. The call is to arm some TSA agents.

It may not be a bad thing.

The security theater is a on downwards slope, and it has too much momentum to be slowed down, let alone be stopped or reversed.

Let it go faster. The sooner it crashes, the better.

Actually, I'm on the fence regarding this line of argument, but I think it had to be made, as a counterpoint to the backlash seen in the other comments.

When your adversary's worst enemy is its own weight, you're rarely in a good position.

Most of the comments here try to spin this story as anti-TSA, which is laughable. Fact is, a man with an assault rifle targeted a vulnerable spot at an airport. That man was batshit insane, which means that while today that man targets TSA agents, tomorrow that man could be suckered in by some other random propaganda pamphlet or web site.

If TSA didn't exist, Mr. Violent Crazy Man simply takes up another cause and chooses another target, and without the TSA, he could could have taken down a plane in-flight, causing 300 deaths rather than one, and incalculable economic damage. Thank you, TSA, for limiting what such men can do. You are the front line of the crazy filter.

Great, mall cops with guns. I feel safer already.

Everyone else calls for the complete and immediate disbandment of the TSA.

Here's an interesting counterpoint to this argument I read yesterday, from someone who worked in the air travel industry but not directly in security:

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/01/opinion/hawk-dont-arm-tsa/...

I have an easier idea for these people's safety: stop putting on the uniform of an organization that needs to be demolished.

How many cumulative travelers' lives have been lost waiting in line for their delusionary make-work theatre?

The death toll due to TSA is undoubtedly large, but the bigger loss of life component of it is likely from people dying in an auto accident after they choose to drive rather than fly.

Security shouldn't be a reaction to a singular event. You can't defend against the lone insane attacker. Yet politics always demands instant (and likely poor) decisions.

When a mass shooting occurs at an school, nobody suggests it's a good idea to have armed security at every school entrance. Why is this any different?

That's always request #1 after a school shooting.

Actually, some people do suggest that, while other people suggest that it would be better if all school employees were armed.

You may disagree with them -- I do -- but certainly the suggestion gets raised all the time.

>nobody suggests it's a good idea to have armed security at every school entrance

They do unfortunately: http://nation.time.com/2012/12/20/how-to-prevent-more-sandy-...

A week after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association broke his silence on the tragedy to call for stronger security in schools. “I call on Congress today, to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation,”

If this happens, it should be local police officers.

It already is. Airport police patrolling LAX were the first people on the scene, within about 60 seconds, per the LA Times article I read recently.

Why? Don't they trust the armed police officers stationed at every checkpoint? You know, the ones that captured the shooter in LAX.

to people complaining about the existence of the TSA, why don't you guys actually give it some thought. Before the TSA, there were differing standards across states/cities/airports concerning airport security. Now, everything has been unified under this single body.

This ends up being a double-edged sword. Easier for some scanner company to lobby one group rather than 50. But for us, we just need to convince one organisation to ease up (plus the FAA sometimes too). "Dismantling" the TSA won't get rid of airport checkpoints no more than dismantling the IRS won't get rid of taxes. Concentrating more on getting the TSA to create laxer policies will go a lot further than efforts to compeltely destroy the agency.

In any case, this is obviously the expected answer to the event, just like every school shooting leads to asking for more armed guards (even armed teachers sometimes).

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