TSA Reminds You Not To Travel With Hand Grenades

coondoggie writes "Some of the travel recommendations posted on the Transportation Security Administration's blog seem stupefying obvious. This week's, entitled: 'Leave Your Grenades at Home' seemed like a no brainer, but alas. The TSA wrote about grenades in particular: Year to date, the agency's officers have discovered: 43 grenades in carry-on baggage and 40 grenades in checked baggage."

Comments

For those of you that don't RTFA...

[OrangeTide]

a majority of the confiscated grenades are fake, replicas or otherwise inert.

Re:For those of you that don't RTFA...

[TheCarp]

Because terrorists are so rare that they are not even worth worrying about, and never were.

Re:For those of you that don't RTFA...

[ArcadeMan]

Here's your solution, then. Make the sturdy doors ugly.

Re:For those of you that don't RTFA...

[omnichad]

Furthermore, if I'm reading the numbers right, 1 live grenade out of 84 found - and that one was an accident by a travelling solider. The rest were completely inert and only look dangerous.

Re: For those of you that don't RTFA...

[BlueStrat]

You're right -- liquids over 100ml are still not permitted through the checkpoint.

Can't you just see the hilarity that would ensue if a passenger (or nearly all passengers for extra "Keystone"-factor) urinated into a >100ml container (besides the onboard holding tank) while in-flight, let it be known to the attendants/crew, and video recorded what happens?

So sick of the security theater. Even a good number of the people who, up till a couple of years ago, have been supportive of the TSA silliness are waking up and becoming ever-more disillusioned, angry, and disgusted. Hopefully enough will finally awake to change things sooner rather than later.

I say that, instead of putting all those TSA employees out of work, we simply re-task them to a more useful and productive role in society.

Picking up litter along all public roads, streets, and highways. Hell, have 'em clean alongside passenger railway lines, too. Take away their security toys and give them trash bags, buckets, rakes, & brooms. They wouldn't even need to change the agency initials.

"Trash and Sanitation Authority"

Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

I bet those fleets of nifty huge TSA SUVs and armored vehicles can move a lot of litter!

I'd even thank them for their hard work in that case, unlike now. At least it would be a respectable and useful job that actually benefits everyone and the environment at the same time it puts low-skilled people in stable jobs. It could also be a way to immensely reduce inmate recidivism rates by transitioning paroled prison inmates through such a job to a non-criminal, employed, and productive life with hope & opportunity.

Strat

Re:For those of you that don't RTFA...

[cold fjord]

I'm afraid your lovely theory is ruined by the history of hijacking.

El Al Flight 426 hijacking
Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. - Aircraft Hijacking
Hijacked Iraq Jet Crashes, Killing 62 : Two Hurl Grenades, Force Airliner Down in Saudi Arabia

There are more.

Re:For those of you that don't RTFA...

[Hadlock]

Plane hijackings and bombings are so notable because they're so exceedingly rare. I think in the entire history of flight the total number of documented cases is under 100. Worldwide.
 
Hyping up a climate of fear over something that's less than a rounding error isn't productive, but I congratulate you on your patriotism.

Re:For those of you that don't RTFA...

[mdielmann]

I also think you picked a rather ironic day to make that statement, the anniversary of an attack that killed 3,000 people and did $100,000,000,000 damage to the US economy.

Every year, ten times more have their lives abruptly cut off from car accidents alone. That means, as of this anniversary, the deaths from the greatest terrorist attack on American soil cost 1% of the lives as the outcome of something people happily (and not-so-happily) do every day, with little or no concern for their safety. If each of these people had $100,000 insurance, we would be about a third of the way to the same economic cost as the terrorist attack, assuming the only burden their death brought was the insurance payout.

Face it. There are only two reasons you care about this event. First, it's an affront to your (false) sense of security. To assuage that, you do other things to improve your sense of security. The evidence indicates they only return you to that false sense of security. Second, they all died in one small area over a short period of time. Kill each of them, with 9 of their friends each, over the span of a year, and it's just a somewhat upsetting fact of modern living. That's an emotional response with no logical basis on the safety of the average citizen. And yes, that means that a vehicle safety improvement that reduces risk of death by 10% will save more lives than those lost in the Twin towers. Each year. So, which one seems a better use of our resources, and yields a better quality of life?

Contrary to the myopic view of some people, the point isn't to spread fear, or to get people to live in fear, but rather to take reasonable precautions. Keeping hand grenades off planes is a reasonable precaution.

Well, I can hardly disagree. So that explains about 70 confiscations per year that the TSA has performed. Now, please explain to my why this applies to nail clippers, but not a nice pen with a reasonably sharp tip and a nice long metal body? Or 3 ounces of fluid? Even breast milk in a baby bottle, accompanied by said baby?

I'm not saying 9/11 wasn't a tragedy. It certainly was. All the daily activities in my life stopped for about 2 hours, as it did for everyone else in the office where I was working. And I was half a continent and a different country away. And I'm not saying reasonable precautions shouldn't be taken. It's the myriad unreasonable ones I'm frustrated with, and the attitude that there is no such thing as too much intrusion in order to stop the next really big terrorist attack, even though it took about 40 years of hostage takings on planes to get one of this significance. I swear, people won't be happy until airplanes look like they did in The Fifth Element (which was actually a spaceship, but the form factor and purpose was identical).

Re:For those of you that don't RTFA...

[osu-neko]

If you want to see what a country looks like where it isn't under control, think back a few years to Iraq.

Picking a country essentially in the midst of a civil war is naturally going to paint an unrealistic picture. If you want a picture of how big a threat terrorism is to the average American air traveler without all the extra security precautions we added after 9/11/2001, look at the average number of deaths per year caused by it up until those additional measures were implemented. If you want to talk about terrorism in general, leave out the "air travelers" part. Even if you just look at the stats for 2001 alone, a banner year for terrorism in the US, it was a less serious cause for concern than a lack of rubber mats in bathrooms. Anything that kills people is something we ought to look at reducing, the question is how do we prioritize our resources to most effectively save the most people without wasting inordinate amounts of money on problems that don't warrant that level of expenditure when more serious problems could use the money more effectively to save more people.

I'm interested in keeping the incidents of terrorism & hijackings under reasonable control which is a rational goal.

Good. And the person you're replying to is pointing out that the problem is under reasonable control and always has been. You can cite all the examples of successful attacks you like, the facts are that it all adds up to an actual problem of significantly smaller proportion that a few hundred other potential causes of loss of life or injury that we spend far, far less time and money worrying about today. To pretend otherwise is fear-mongering.

Fuck Network World

[Anonymous Coward]

Link to the fucking TSA blog, not the idiotic morons at Network World: http://blog.tsa.gov/2013/09/tsa-travel-tips-tuesday-leave-your.html . Please do not click NW links, and if you must, be sure to have your ad blocker on.

Complete Failure

[Anonymous Coward]

The TSA:

1) Allows ex convicts to grope your children.
2) Takes and stores full 3d scanned naked images of you using tech for which the cancer-risk has not been adequately assessed.
3) Steals valuables from your luggage.
4) Costs taxpayers a fortune.

and in return:

5) Has foiled exactly zero terrorist plots.
6) Fails to make you safer in any way.

Just sayin'.

Re:Complete Failure

[Anonymous Coward]

The TSA sounds a lot like my exwife!

Badumtish!

Re:Complete Failure

[cavreader]

Hijackings were pretty rare in the US at the time of 9/11 and the security at the time did make it hard to smuggle in a gun or bomb. Before 9/11 I never heard of case where a gun was successfully smuggled onto a plane in the US. The hijackers on the planes on 9/11 bluffed everyone with threats of a bomb and box cutters for weapons. If this same scenario happened today the first people who stood up and announced they have a bomb and brandish a little knife would most likely get the ever living shit kicked out of them by the passengers. It was passengers who subdued the guy with underwear bomb. The guy who tried to light his shoes on fire to set off an explosion was also subdued by the passengers. Sure some passengers could get injured or even killed in the fight but that's still a whole lot better than killing everyone by crashing the plane.

Re:Complete Failure

[dido]

Lisa: Dad, what if I were to tell you that this rock keeps away tigers.
Homer: Uh-huh, and how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work. It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: I see.
Lisa: But you don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock.