posted 09-15-2001 11:18 PM            

Brazil Parliament Votes To
Allow Air Passengers To
Carry Light Firearms
From Thomas Buyea
ranger116@webtv.net
From Tomás Mano de Carvalho
Alliance Nacional do Brasil
9-15-1

RIO DE JANEIRO - To avoid that an aircraft is used as bomb against important buildings, the Brazilian parlament decided today to liberate light weapons (calibre less than 0.38) for all passengers over 21 years old.

As 65% of all Brazilians with income more than US$ 2000 always walks equipped with gun, the government finds it safe and guaranteed that sufficient persons will react against any eventual highjackings.

Extra information will be distributed and presented by the air hostess, when they show the safety equipment they will also inform the passengers to prepare eventual shot with precision, always take aim at chest to avoid that bullets perforate the shell of the aircraft.

The president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, wanted to make his veto against the proposal, but was rejected by the astounding majority of 234 against 6 votes.

Pass this information to American news-agencies to lighten a new angle in perspective of criminality.

MainPage http://www.rense.com
---------------------------------------------

Maybe we're getting it all wrong trying to make sure there are absolutely no weapons allowed on our planes. I'm sure if there had of been a few individuals carrying guns and having the ability to effectively hit their targets maybe the WTC scenario would not have happened.
I was listening to the radio a few days back and an individual came on explaining the differences in some of the new types of weapons available. He mentioned a certain type of gun that shoots bullets that are very short range and won't go thru anything very thick...(like only one layer of sheet rock) almost sounded like a rubber bullet.
At the very least what would be so bad about possibly equipping a plain clothes officer with something like a stun gun?

How about also having a few male flight attendants aboard ..they could be trained in security measures and also be trained sharp shooters. Maybe some of the female attendants should be trained shooters.

And how about the doors to the cockpits.. I've heard they're about as thick as cardboard! Gosh... maybe it's time to put in more secure doors..with locks even.

Another idea could be the installation of hidden security cameras so pilots can see what's going on with the passengers. One hint of trouble and he could be tripping a switch to alert ground control that a dangerous situation is brewing.

And then I'd recommend that they advertise these new safety precautions to the flying public to try to relieve the mounting fears people seem to be having about flying again. And they should enact some of these measures quickly before some companies end up filing bankruptcy due to lack of business.

Just a few ideas I've been having..

posted 09-18-2001 02:39 PM            

My weapon of choice would be an autoloading pistol chambered in cal .22LR. Even at subsonic speeds, a 35-gr bullet would be an incapacitating or killing round, and ensuring that the bullet is frangible, e.g., Glaser safety slugs, would lower the potential for depressurizing the aircraft.

As far as the cockpit door is concerned, layering both it and the surrounding bulkhead with Kevlar®, incorporating additional steel or composite struts, and replacing the hinges and latches with heavier steel assemblies would do much to increase security without imposing a major weight or cost penalty. And JR in the buff wouldn't hurt, either.

Regards,

posted 09-18-2001 10:43 PM            

is the right round for stopping terrorists

but not breatching tin cans (airplanes)

posted 09-18-2001 10:59 PM            

OK i will put down the crackpipe and step away from the keyboard now mav

posted 09-19-2001 12:40 AM            

This man speaks to my heart.

In A Libertarian America ...
by Thomas L. Knapp
September 12, 2001
Originally published in Liberty For All
------------------------------------------------------------------------

A decade ago, I stood in the ruins of a little town called Khafji, along the Saudi-Kuwait border. I remember at the time fervently praying that no American city would ever have to look like that place. Even though the battle for Khafji was two months past, dead animals still lay in the roads and the buildings were pockmarked with bullet holes. Armed men -- both my fellow U.S. Marines and Saudi border personnel -- wandered the streets, fingers on triggers, and one tall building, overlooking the phone center from which I called home to my family in the U.S. -- leaned precariously over me.

Yesterday, Khafji came here.

Like all of you, I watched the events of September 11, 2001, unfold with a growing sense of horror. Four civilian passenger planes hijacked, and three of them intentionally rammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the fourth crashing in rural Pennsylvania. The flames, the smoke, the blood and the helplessness.

I began receiving cautionary notes about this article before I even began to write it. Now, those notes said, is not the time to express any criticism of the government of the United States. Now is not the time to talk about what might have been, or even what might be. Now is only the time to stand behind your government in whatever it chooses to do. Now is the time to bury dissent. Now is the time for unity, wherever that may lead. Now is the time for duty.

It doesn't work that way, however. A position based on principle and fact doesn't change because it becomes inconvenient, or even dangerous, to express it. Change -- _necessary_ change -- is achieved by pointing out the problem. The faint of heart cannot stomach this when it flies in the face of a juggernaut like that about to be unleashed on the world by a wounded nation. The apathetic don't care if it is expressed at any other time. There is no "good" time to say the things that people don't want to hear. But if ever there was a necessary time to tell them what they need to know, this is it.

It is not with a light heart that I write this. Somewhere beneath the rubble, someone I know or who once touched my life is no doubt gasping her last breath or has already descended into eternal sleep. In the air, on land and at sea, my former comrades in the Marine Corps await orders that may send them to their deaths in the necessary task of punishing this crime against humanity. Around the nation and the world, people mourn and I mourn with them -- but duty does not recognize any of these as justification for avoiding the awful truths. It does not recognize any obligation to ignore the facts in favor of feeling better.

The fact is that in a libertarian America, yesterday's attacks would not have happened. The fact is that in a libertarian America, yesterday's attacks couldn't have happened the way they did. To that extent, the libertarian ideal is a necessary component of the discussion that this nation will be engaging in for the foreseeable future.

In a libertarian America, our government would not have its troops stationed around the world, putting out other people's fires and making enemies of those with whom we have no legitimate argument.

A libertarian America would not cheer as its bombs rained down on passenger trains in Belgrade. It would not apathetically accept the deaths of Iraqi children due to the epidemic of cholera caused by our bombing of Baghdad's sanitary facilities, nor would it endure the spectacle of its own young men dragged down the streets of Mogadishu or the broken bodies of its Marines being carried from a barracks in Beirut.

A libertarian America would not cheer, apathetically accept, or endure these things because these things would not happen. A libertarian America would not regard its troops as an international police force. It would not treat them as human sacrifices to some misguided ideal of internationalism, and it would not pile more of their bodies on the altar when the ideal fails to materialize -- as it will every time.

And, consequently, a libertarian America would not face the constant prospect of attack at the hands of those whom it has injured in vain attempts to realize that ideal.

However, assuming that there are those who attack even if unprovoked, it is worthwhile to ask what the attacker would find confronting him in a libertarian America.

A libertarian America would not illegally disarm more than 200 of its own citizens before they boarded an aircraft, leaving them at the mercy of thugs with knives. Any airliner in a libertarian America would no doubt have on its passenger manifest several individuals exercising their inalienable Constitutional and human right to defend their lives by carrying the weapon of their choice.

A libertarian America would not rely on the false security of metal detectors and X-ray machines to preserve the lives of its citizens. It would rely on their natural capacity to preserve their own lives -- and yesterday's attackers would not even consider the possibility of being able to take over a passenger aircraft and use it as a flying bomb.

The evil will always find a way to cause harm. There is no getting around that. A libertarian America, however, would minimize the availability of such methods, and it would minimize the provocations that could be used as an excuse.

Ultimately, of course, the people responsible for the attacks of September 11 are the people who planned them and carried them out. To limit responsibility to those individuals, however, is to ignore the context in which the attacks could and did happen.

Our politicians have acted for years with impunity, citing only our "national interest," as if any legitimate interest could be served by the intentional killing of civilians simply because those civilians have been designated "the enemy" by a vote of Congress. Yesterday's attacks prove that the "national interest" we've been pursuing, and the supposed impunity with which we have pursued it, are illusory.

We watched as those politicians were hustled away to "safe houses," the better to immunize themselves from the consequences of their own actions of years and decades past. No one has asked why Dennis Hastert or Diane Feinstein were entitled to the special protection denied the thousands of people in Manhattan and Washington who were even then paying the price -- in blood -- of an imperial foreign policy crafted by poltroons who hide themselves in bunkers when the bill collector knocks on the door.

Now, they emerge from their hiding places, and they wail and gnash their teeth, vowing revenge and demanding that we surrender even more of our freedoms in order to avoid more of what they themselves brought upon us in the first place. They regard the blood of September 11 not as a horrible payment for their past errors, but as ink with which to write new checks to the order of their power and drawn on the account of our lives and freedoms.

posted 09-19-2001 10:20 AM            

While I, too, am enraged by the acts of the terrorists and want to see them all punished to the full extent of the law and bamboo slivers under the fingernails, I have to admit that my country, by its internationalist policies, has opened itself and its citizens to the angry responses of people whose lives we have impacted. As I mentioned in another post, just because we can defeat any other country in the world (and we can, of course) is no reason why we must play international cop and Santa Claus to the world. That approach has paid off in Khobar Towers, soldiers dragged to their deaths in the streets of Mogadishu, the USS Cole, and now over 4,000 dead Americans - and almost 1,000 dead from other countries -- in New York and Washington, DC.

Knapp is saying (and I concur) that it's not that we back the wrong dog in the dog-fight (which we usually do) but that we back any dog at all.

The Taliban, like many other radical religionists, believe that their way is the only way, and that the rest of the world must follow their way, for if they do not, they are evil and must be destroyed! And that's the difference between them and us, isn't it? I mean we don't try to jam our beliefs down the throats of the rest of the world, like the Taliban and other irrational Allah-boys, right?

Wrong.

Representative government, universal education, equal rights for all, freedom of religion and the press - they all work for us, right? And since they work for us, then we have an obligation to make sure everyone else puts them to work for themselves, right?

What we don't seem to understand is that billions of people throughout the world believe just as strongly about their stuff as we believe about our stuff - and those two collections of stuff are mutually exclusive.

It's easy for Knapp to say that we should avoid entangling alliances. I agree. I don't think it's in our interests either as a country or as a people to help Israelis kill Palestinians, Turks kill Kurds, Kosovars kill Serbs, Chinese kill Tibetans, or anyone else kill anyone else. (If you yourself want to help, of course, feel free; but I'm talking about a government policy that forces all Americans to participate in helping Group A kill Group B.) Having a policy where - for one reason or another - we help one country fight its wars, is going to get billions of folks whom we're not helping really, really mad at us.

But that's not the only reason why the radical religionists are angry at us, and here's where Knapp's argument bends a bit. Because the radical religionists don't just want to be left alone; they want to push their culture on us. They not only want to be free to practice a firebrand version of sha'aria, but want the rest of the world to practice it, too. The very fact that there are, someplace in the world, a group of people who are not strict Muslims is a battle call to them.

So even if we were to drop our radical proselytizing about civil rights and freedoms and kept our nose out of other countries' business, there's no guarantee that they'd keep their nose out of ours. Maybe what we are seeing is the beginning of the end of an ongoing kulturkampf which started with Roger Bacon, Galileo, Geoffry of Occam, Copernicus, and Charles Darwin.

If that's the case, of course, it will be a war - not a war to the death of one side, but a war to one side's extinction.

posted 09-19-2001 10:23 AM            

Boeing Country: Cockpit security on many minds

Eastside Journal (Bellevue Wash) 09/18/01 author: Chris Genna

After the catastrophic events of last Tuesday, there has been a lot of talk about reinforcing cockpit doors on airliners to prevent unauthorized people from gaining control of the airplane.

It's true that armored or reinforced doors would address just one aspect of the series of missteps that lead to disaster Sept. 11. But the disaster has stirred a lot of thinking about all sorts of ways to increase security aboard commercial jets; reinforced cockpit doors are just one area of brainstorming.

In fact, a Kirkland resident told the Journal that he had e-mailed to Boeing a list of suggestions that included attack-resistant cockpit doors, live cockpit video to ground stations, flight attendant-activated transponder codes for a hijacking -- even flooding the cabin with some sort of temporarily disabling gas. The retired Boeing engineer offered his services free if federal agencies or Boeing were strapped for cash.

But he said his suggestions were returned to him undelivered. An internal Boeing news item yesterday may explain why that was.

``(Boeing) Commercial Airplanes Engineering already has a group dedicated to evaluating all enhancements to our airplanes and for legal reasons, cannot accept unsolicited ideas,'' said the news item on Boeing's internal Web yesterday morning. ``To protect the company from potential liability, and to protect the individuals' ideas, it is important not to forward these ideas to any Boeing employees.''

The article directed employees to forward unsolicited suggestions to a branch of Boeing's Phantom Works, which could tell the sender how to submit their ideas properly.

But some pilots wondered if the tragedy last Tuesday couldn't have been prevented with better flight crew training. Pilots, they said, are comfortable with the idea that they are figures of authority aboard a plane, and may be too willing to step back in the cabin to deal with a disturbance. Until Tuesday, pilot training always assumed the trouble-maker was not a suicidal hijacker.

If its attack-resistant doors that are needed, they're available, Boeing says. ``Some non-U.S. operators have obtained amendments (to certificates of airworthiness) through their regulatory agencies'' for such doors, Boeing spokeswoman Liz Verdier said.

Such doors have been certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Verdier said, emphasizing that Boeing couldn't install a door not certified by the FAA.

``The current requirement for design of cockpit doors is that they must be capable of being breached in case of emergency,'' she said.

That requirement may limit the ability to make current doors terrorist-proof.

One New York company, FINX Group Inc., said it's prepared to get a cockpit door certified that is storm-proof and even bullet-proof.

It is made of ``very sophisticated materials'' that have withstood 7.62 mm NATO penetrator rounds, said Alan Risi of Georal International, FINX's licensor. Risi wouldn't give a price, but he said the weight penalty might be the equivalent of one passenger.

FINX also makes an automated or unattended security door for airports that can keep unauthorized people out of secure areas such as the service tarmac. The door -- unlike the cockpit door, it is already FAA-certified -- admits only one person at a time, verifies they are authorized to be in that area, and can detect almost any kind of weapon.

The doors are installed ``in onesies and twosies,'' Risi said, in Dallas-Fort Worth, O'Hare in Chicago, and others places -- but not in enough numbers to protect every entrance. The doors cost about $60,000 each, Risi said.