Garrison Keillor: Guns on a plane [View All]

[billbuckhead]

Guns on a plane

The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers to bring loaded firearms aboard. Where's the NRA when you need 'em?

By Garrison Keillor


Sept. 13, 2006 | And now you can't bring your cup of coffee on board the airplane. It's the latest new rule laid down by the nation's security wizards. Everyone knows it's ridiculous -- the notion that you can toss together a few liquids and make an explosive is a fiction from late-night movies. You might as well prohibit bald men on the grounds that the evil Lex Luthor was bald and so was Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE.

But we ditch our venti latte in the trash barrel (goodbye, four bucks) and board the flight, and there we read in the paper that aggressive CIA questioning of an al-Qaida bigwig -- stripping him, turning the air conditioner to 40 degrees, blasting him with Red Hot Chili Peppers music -- broke him, so he ratted on Jose Padilla, a terrorist who set out to make a dirty bomb and who believed that by swinging a bucket of uranium in a circle over his head he could separate plutonium. It's like a cartoon.

The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers to bring loaded firearms aboard: guys in orange vests sitting in exit rows with deer rifles on their laps, ladies with Mr. Colt in their purses, kids with peashooters. Somebody wake up the NRA. Does the Second Amendment say "The right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed except on commercial airliners"? Where is the right wing when you really need them?
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<http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/09/13/keillor/index.html>