<story><title>20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?</title><url>https://www.ocregister.com/2021/09/07/20-years-after-9-11-will-we-ever-stop-taking-our-shoes-off-at-airports/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>umvi</author><text>&amp;gt; We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths&lt;p&gt;It would be a highly controversial dashboard, I guarantee it, likely unpopular with both political parties.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that assuaging fear is often more important (to irrational people) than saving lives.&lt;p&gt;For example, guns. &lt;i&gt;Very&lt;/i&gt; few people die because of mass shootings. Your chances of dying in a mass shooting are virtually nil. Yet, every time one happens there&amp;#x27;s a big frenzy to enact anti-gun policies. So you have all this talk of &amp;quot;bump stocks&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ghost guns&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;assault weapons&amp;quot; and whatnot, but it&amp;#x27;s all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn&amp;#x27;t to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don&amp;#x27;t take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn&amp;#x27;t focused on handguns and suicides.</text></item><item><author>GhostVII</author><text>We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone&amp;#x27;s time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths, while still being OK with high speed limits that kill thousands of people per year. Not that I&amp;#x27;m advocating for lower speed limits, just that there is a contradiction here.&lt;p&gt;I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you&amp;#x27;d save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AnthonyMouse</author><text>&amp;gt; So you have all this talk of &amp;quot;bump stocks&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ghost guns&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;assault weapons&amp;quot; and whatnot, but it&amp;#x27;s all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn&amp;#x27;t to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don&amp;#x27;t take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn&amp;#x27;t focused on handguns and suicides.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also politics. If you actually wanted to solve the problem, well, like two thirds of US firearms fatalities are suicides. So a real solution is going to look like &amp;quot;improve mental health&amp;quot; and not &amp;quot;restrict who can buy a gun&amp;quot; or else you&amp;#x27;re only going to be diverting people to other methods of suicide, or keeping people &amp;quot;alive&amp;quot; but still in such a precarious mental state that the only thing preventing them from taking their own life is access to an effective means. Neither of which is actually acceptable.&lt;p&gt;But from a political perspective, proposing useless gun restrictions makes the other team have to spend political capital to oppose them, because even if they&amp;#x27;re completely ineffective at their stated purpose, they upset or inconvenience the other team&amp;#x27;s constituents. Which seems to be the goal of modern US politics.</text></comment>
<story><title>20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?</title><url>https://www.ocregister.com/2021/09/07/20-years-after-9-11-will-we-ever-stop-taking-our-shoes-off-at-airports/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>umvi</author><text>&amp;gt; We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths&lt;p&gt;It would be a highly controversial dashboard, I guarantee it, likely unpopular with both political parties.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that assuaging fear is often more important (to irrational people) than saving lives.&lt;p&gt;For example, guns. &lt;i&gt;Very&lt;/i&gt; few people die because of mass shootings. Your chances of dying in a mass shooting are virtually nil. Yet, every time one happens there&amp;#x27;s a big frenzy to enact anti-gun policies. So you have all this talk of &amp;quot;bump stocks&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ghost guns&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;assault weapons&amp;quot; and whatnot, but it&amp;#x27;s all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn&amp;#x27;t to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don&amp;#x27;t take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn&amp;#x27;t focused on handguns and suicides.</text></item><item><author>GhostVII</author><text>We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone&amp;#x27;s time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths, while still being OK with high speed limits that kill thousands of people per year. Not that I&amp;#x27;m advocating for lower speed limits, just that there is a contradiction here.&lt;p&gt;I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you&amp;#x27;d save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vowelless</author><text>&amp;gt; For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings.&lt;p&gt;Adjusted for how armed Americans are, gun violence in this country is tiny. And seeing what an armed citizenry can do against the full American force (Afghanistan), an armed population is a necessity against tyranny in America.</text></comment>