The security at LBG starts from the moment that your car/bus gets off the highway, they inspect every vehicle as it enters. They watch for suspicious activity, throughout the airport. They question you before you check your luggage and send most luggage through the X-ray. They have passport control on outbound passengers.
By the time you get onto your flight the security at the airport has run an entire background check to make sure that you are not a terrorist.
Passengers are not hindered for no good reason, and people who obviously pose no threat are even capable of getting onto an airplane within 45 minutes!

Of course you notice the security, and the questioning can be unnerving, but they do what they can to streamline the process and not hassle people unnecessarily.

i am more scared of the idiots with the power of not letting me board the plane without any comprehensible reason than of terrorists.

if you are entrusted by the state to carry a gun, you should be allowed to board the plane with it. i would love to know that there's a trained sniper with gun either disguised as a passenger, or in a hidden lookout post in every single plane that flies. even an ex-military or police with a gun as a passenger is also very assuring to me. just save the painful body search, specially taking off the shoes.

As painful an irritating as it is, we need these people. Perhaps they could be more efficient, but having an unqualified person eating a sandwich while hundreds of bags and people pass per hour is an invitation to trouble which is now highly discouraged.

I'm not exactly fond of how we've gotten with regard to firearms, either. I don't own one, but my father-in-law's a soldier, & his brothers hunt whatever's in season. Guns are tools, just like hammers or chisels or... That being said, I had a penknife confiscated because I forgot to take it from my pants pocket before we left. My bad. I make mistakes. I take responsibility for having done them, do what I have to do, & move on.

Frankly, if I'm given a choice to travel somewhere, I prefer the train: The food's better, the seats are about the same, the scenery's fascinating, & I can use my laptop all the time. Some of the trains even have free Wi-Fi.

For those of you who complain here, rest assured that we'll deal with you in due time. As a good American, you should know that your job is to sit back, shut up, and do as you're told by those (like me) that know better. The TSA is keeping you safe and we're not going anywhere. That's all you need to know. Don't question us.

But if TSA stops working, the terrorists will return for sure.

Err no you are making atleast two assumptions without reason,

1, The TSA works.
2, That there are terrorists waiting to attack from aircraft departing US airports.

It has already been shown as mentioned in some of the above comments that the TSA is at best no better than the previous security arangments.

9/11 happened because the security arrangements were deficient, not because of the airlines but because the US Government chose to let them be so. That is the box cutters in the 9/11 terrorist pockets were discovered by airport security but they were not on the prohibited items list so were allowed on the aircraft.

Also the TSA is disproportionately expensive when compared to the previous system and regularly fails to detect weapons it's own inspectors attempt to carry on to test the TSA ground staff.

Secondly as has been demonstrated terrorists don't need to launch an aircraft based attack from US soil which is where the TSA operate. So if you consider Cpl Hot Foot and Capt Underpants as they ably demonstrated there is absolutly nothing the TSA ground staff could have done to stop them (not that they were actually credible threats to the aircraft concerned no matter how much the Fox news "talking heads" talked it up). Therefor from that perspective the TSA is most certainly not working as a deterrent to terrorists.

Further as was demonstrated with the bombs hidden in IT equipment sent from Somalia terrorists don't need to go through "check in" to get bombs onboard aircraft.

Thirdly there is no evidence that security is a deterant to terrorists, they go for targets of opportunity irespective of how heavily armed they are (think back to the US Navy ship that nearly got sunk by an inflatable boat full of explosives). That is they look for a weak spot and attack that they do not sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for a supposadly defended target to become undefended. The simple fact is the US has probably millions if not hundreds of millions of weak spots yet they have not been attacked. All we have seen is a bunch of semi-literates and those with mental disorders "found and recruited" by under cover agents working for one of the US Governments three letter agencies.

Thus it is quite likley that US soil is not currently a target for "home grown" or foreign terrorists with any capability to act.

Further we know from other information that the number of home made bombs in the US used to settle grudges etc and usually made from pipes and black powder etc don't appear to have changed much. So we can probably rule out "lack of access to materials" as a cause of a lack of terrorist attacks.

The question also arises that with the recent changes (Arab Spring) in the middle east is there even any real support for AQ terrorists any longer?

What is more likly to make attacks on US soil more likely is the lack of US targets abroad. For over ten years US troops have been fighting in the Middle East and have been regularly attacked by the normal terrorist arsenal of improvised weapons. As long as the US were fighting on the home soil of the organisations that supposadly gave rise to the terrorist attacks then there was no need to attack on US soil, as their enemy had come to them and they were soldiers not innocent civilians thus it was "moral war" not "immoral murder". And importantly as the situation was effectivly a stalemate these organisation know that if they want political power on anything cloose to their own terms they are going to have to negotiate whilst they still have home support, that they are begining to lose (arab spring again).

But the US troops are going home, soon the only easily accessable US citizens on foreign soil will be tourists. Thus if the US is still in the cross hairs of international terrorists then I would expect to see the attacks start in US tourist destinations first. Which again the TSA can do absolutly nothing to stop...

Rumor has it that at a major east coast airport the front doors are locked but the back door, i.e. food service workers, some being illegals, are free to load up the plane with food carts full of explosives. The TSA is the biggest dog & pony show in existence.

The control for this experiment was the decades of domestic and internation flying that took place pre-9/11.

People continue to gloss over the fact that the core reason 9/11 occurred was not because people got on the plane with box cutters, but that we had known foreign nationals, some with known terrorist ties, overstaying their visas and here illegally. 9/11 was not an airport security failure, but a failure of (again) our immigration system to properly document the people who cross our borders and stay here illegally

Do you realize Sniffing Dogs catch more threats than all the new added equipment and procedures?

Heaven forbid we profile for who we already is suspect. We might offend some wacko instead of feeling up granny and radiating frequent fliers.

In the US, the change was to instill fear that potentially anyone traveling could harm you, it that respect...they did achieve a major goal. We now have the TSA to protect us, unfortunately, I learned many, many, many years ago, "if someone really wants to do something harmful, they will most likely succeed".

We do not have the ability nor the resources to manage every square foot of territory against anything.

I believe that if the captain and co-pilot and select other individuals were allowed to carry a sidearm on the plane that 9-11 would have never happened and we wouldn't have Janet Reno and the massively expensive Homeland Security group to contend with today.

On the subject of aircraft terrorism, it's critical to remember that our very own Federal government made the 9/11 attacks possible by forcing an open cockpit/cooperate with hijackers policy on public carriers. Was a time when aircraft security, like shipboard security was the Captain's sole province and many carried sidearms. Uncle Sugar knew better and look what it got us!

***So? Do you assume that somebody who did not forgot and lied when the gun was found had sure intentions to fire that gun on the plane?***

Response:

Doesn't matter who assumes what. Carrying a handgun onto a plane is illegal, except under very strict circumstances. And yes, it could be fired by the individual who is carrying it, or by someone who takes it from him in flight. Which is the safer assumption, that the gun probably will not be fired, or that, yes, it could be fired. You people really don't think your answers through, do you?

Quote:

***Depends on what you do for a living. If you are law enforcement, or former law enforcement, it's just a part of your dress routine in the morning.***

Response:

Any good judge would tell a current or former law enforcement officer that they are in violation of law. Ignorance is no excuse. After all, that is what the officer would tell any citizen when enforcing the law.

You need to read the best study on the subject that has been done so far, and that is "What Terrorists Really Want", by Max Abrahms. You can find it in .pdf form via Google.

These are some of Abrahms' conclusions:

(1) Terrorists are not after political goals. They only say they are. Whenever the political goals of terrorist organizations have been reached (which has ALWAYS happened by the actions of other people, never the terrorists), they simply find another goal to go out and terrorize people over. So giving them what they say they want will not cause them to stop.

(2) THEY DO NOT TELL YOU what they really want. This should be obvious, since they always say they want political goals, but in reality they never do.

(3) Terrorism is NOT "the last resort" for these terrorist organizations. Almost without exception, terrorism has been their FIRST choice of action. They have not resorted to terrorism because other avenues of approach didn't work. The fact is that they didn't even try other methods.

(4) Terrorists actually have a gangland mentality. What they really want is the attention of their peers, and that's all. So they do not deserve misplaced political sympathy for "the oppressed". That's not what they are about, at all. What they want to do is destroy, and they do it for the worst of all possible reasons: attention. It is as simple as that.

Shh don't give the terrorists who read this blog the idea to blow-up our corn supplies at source!

;)

I can also confirm that it is very easy to forget you're wearing a small handgun.
And Felix, please stop talking before you make yourself look even sillier.

"United 93, the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, and others are proof. [...] Since passengers fight back now, the only way terrorists can take control is if they can overpower all the rest of the passengers."

The two would-be terrorists who were caught don't support this point. They could easily have gone into a bathroom and succeeded. I think that they failed intentionally, meaning that they wanted to be caught, perhaps to save face ("well, it looks like he tried" rather than "that scumbag chickened out").

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/01/11/...

Presumably the pepper spray was less than 2oz

Airport security? Airport INSECURITY more like.

Unfortunately, I've found three groups of people when it comes to guns:
1. People scared of guns who just want them to go away.
2. People who understand guns want them to be used responsibly.
3. People who like guns but don't want to be bothered learning about them, such as how to use them safely.

It's that third group that's damaging, and the first group is happy screwing over the second group to deal with them.

My preference, however, would be to minimize the third group by moving more people into the second group from both sides.

@Clancy Nacht: I agree with you 100% there.

And is it reasonable to believe that the majority of the population would be threatened by a nail file? Is it reasonable to believe that a cupcake is a threat?

I get that it's *possible* but is it *reasonable*?

Ok, for the sake of the argument I'll refer from questioning your simplistic view of the world. So if it's easier for you, let's assume I am a nut job, have no combat experience whatsoever, and want guns banned. Still: How does that invalidate my point?

What would you expect to happen in a scenario as described above, when dozens of mostly untrained, armed people suddenly found themselves in the middle of a firefight aboard a passenger plane? With no way of telling the Bad Guys from the rest of the gun-waving crowd? Feel free to elaborate - I might be a nut job, but I'm quite willing to be persuaded by rational argument. But I simply don't understand how arming everyone aboard a plane should make flying safer. And please, don't turn this into another gun control debate, I'm only interested in the specifc scenario.

I was flying out of Kansas City and watched as the crew for another flight passed through the checkpoint ahead of me. Each crew member had a large (>1 liter) water bottle and, in at least one case, the contents had been visibly "altered" (looked like a bottle of ice tea). No problems with bringing those through the checkpoint, though the crew still had to go through the usual metal detector and x-ray.

I actually asked about this on the TSA blog, but got a very confusing answer. As I understood it, they trust the flight crews enough to feel they won't bring binary explosives aboard (the liquid ban for the rest of us), but not that they won't bring guns aboard. Huh?

Also, I'd loe to see the chain of custody that ensures that when the passenger next to me buys a bottle of water past the checkpoint that he is not been slipped a binary explosive covertly by a co-conspirator.

It seems that this bit of metal could have been shurken. However, I would say that the decoration on the front and the engraving on the back should have given it away.

Thankfully, after being escalated through several levels of management, someone finally understood what it was.

Although if OSHA had also been around there would have been adequate guardrails to prevent him falling.

There are a lot of everyday items LEGAL to carry on a plane that scare the #$%^ out of me, but TSA logic says it hasn't been used as a weapon YET, so it's o.k.

TSA now allows scissors up yo 4". Take them apart and you have two 2" knives!