Not really. Honestly the best places are probably TSA checkpoints considering how slow and clogged they get. In almost any amusement park during the summer (one of the reasons Disney searches all bags and has undercover security everywhere). Time Square at various times.
Yes exploding on a plane likely kills 100+ at once but in all honestly I would imagine it's far easier to do it elsewhere you just might need a tiny bit more explosive material.
And now I'm thoroughly depressed. Life is so fragile...well on the scale I care about.
Are you sure? The majority of largest terrorist attacks, casualty wise, didn't even involve a plane except for September 11th attacks (obviously several did but not the majority) [1].
> The recent airport bombings didn't kill as many people as a single airplane. I'm tempted to blame it on incompetence, but we shouldn't deny the facts.
That airport bombing was very different than the suggested TSA security line hypothetical as the airports in Istanbul work fundamentally different (I addressed in the other comment).
What facts am I denying? I always try to base my opinion around only facts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_and_other_viol...
Airplanes might not be targeted as much, but that wiki link shows they are the most deadly per bomb. The other high-fatality bombings were multiple bombs.
In the end, my point is that despite the concern for security lines, they don't seem to end up being the massive disaster they could be. Certainly they are not worse than the airplane attacks they seek to prevent, which is the main point.
Fundamentally different than the TSA lines I referenced. In Istanbul they have two security checkpoints, one brief one at the entrance to the airport itself and another further in similar to the TSA. The attackers mostly pushed their way through the first one and it ended up being a choke point for them. They didn't get near where the bulk of the people were.
> The Lockerbie bomber used a small cassette player filled with Semtex to kill 243 people -- aided by 90,000kg of jet fuel and 31,000ft of gravity.
Hence why I didn't discount it. Attempting to brings explosives onto a plane and setting them off seems like a far more difficult task than doing it in an area with a similar people concentration and zero people checking your bags.
The US government's approach is pretty obvious is to attempt to prevent attacks through various means (reducing risks at airpoint checkpoints, keeping tabs on ammonium nitrate sales, etc), pursing investigations of people deemed vulnerable to terrorist manipulation, and blunting the impact of anything that does happen. When you watch the public coverage when something happens, there's a few common narratives, and they are always focused on portraying the offenders as loners who "aren't taking orders" from anyone.
The initial bomb damage was a 50cm (20in) hole. Disruption of control systems (steering and stabilizer cables) lead to a pitch of the aircraft, aerodynamic forces of a 500kph (313 kn) airstream tore off the nose of the aircraft, parts of which impacted with and initiated further disintegration of trailing portions.
Again: fuel did not contribute to the damage inflicted on the aircraft.
I'm sure NYC would be perfectly willing to have the right to search all people entering the city (or at least Manhattan, which has a limited set of entry points, so it's easier to check). The Democrats could be convinced with a gun violence argument ("all those guns used to come from nearby states with more lax gun laws, but now we can stop them!"), and the Republicans of course would be satisfied with a bit of talk about terrorism.
Uh absolutely not. Nobody who lives in the city would vote for that, ESPECIALLY if it was just for Manhattan (since most people in Manhattan during the day don't live there).
NYC transit, much of the time, is a relatively well-oiled machine and introducing a huge delay like that would make the city explode in anger.
NYPD already has some "checkpoints" setup outside of certain subway entrances where they "randomly" (you can probably guess how random it is) pull people off to check their baggage.
Rarely do they check more than 1/1000 people entering the subway (and that's being extremely generous, it's probably far less frequent), because there might literally be a riot if they backed up an entire subway station checking everyone entering.
Yeah, I don't think the guy you replied to is familiar with Manhattan at all, otherwise he wouldn't have said "a limited set of entry points".
I just counted 16 different subway lines entering Manhattan. And that's only counting "1" for each line the MTA map groups together. And that's not counting the PATH trains. Or all the trains that come into Penn Station. Or all the trains that come into Grand Central.
Then there are the bridges. Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburgh, 59th street, Triborough, George Washington. Probably a few smaller ones up in the Bronx that I'm forgetting.
Then there is the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the Queens Midtown Tunnel. Others?
Oh, and there are countless ferries crossing the Hudson River and the East River. Plus the Staten Island Ferry.
And some heliports.
I've forgotten half of it, since I haven't lived there in 40+ years. And my names are probably obsolete. I know that one of those structures was renamed after Ed Koch, but probably nobody in NYC uses that name.
You can certainly enumerate them all if you tried hard enough. So, definitely "a limited set of entry points".
It would be more informative to say "a large and very busy set of entry points".
Just in case it was bugging you: The 59th St bridge is officially the "Ed Koch Queensboro bridge," but totally correct that nobody calls it that. Sometimes you'll hear it called "Queensboro bridge," though.
They also keep trying to get everyone to call the Triborough bridge "RFK bridge" (they even officially renamed the bridge), but I think it'll be a cold day in hell before people actually start using that name.
Airport security lines would be an obvious target with hundreds of people (at the larger terminals).
Major cities are full of areas where hundreds of people routinely gather within a small radius. Airplanes aren't special.
Pre-9/11, pre-Richard Reid airport security was generally sensible and not too much of a burden.