Steve Scalise: After 9/11, We Didn't Ban Airplanes
Category: News & Politics
Via: john-russell • 3 years ago • 12 commentsBy: Jonathan Chait (Intelligencer)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Here in America, when one of our regular mass-shooting events occurs on a sufficiently large or horrifying scale, we often spend a few days debating small-scale reforms that might reduce the frequency of similar atrocities — before Republicans vote them down.
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise objects to this ritual — not the failing, but the trying. He grasped for a comparison to demonstrate the absurdity of being stampeded into enacting safety regulations merely because a ghastly tragedy occurred. He settled, strangely, on 9/11.
After that tragedy, he explained, nobody limited access to the weapon that was used, airplanes:
Airplanes were used that day as the weapon to kill thousands of people and to inflict terror on our country. There wasn't a conversation about banning airplanes. There was a conversation about connecting the dots. How we can try to figure out if there are signs we can see to stop the next attack from happening.
Scalise may have borrowed this comparison from his colleague, Lauren Boebert, who recently asserted, "When 9/11 happened, we didn't ban planes. We secured the cockpits." But relying on Boebert as a source of well-grounded, factual analysis is generally not a good idea.
In fact, after 9/11, Congress enacted sweeping restrictions on air travel. Before 9/11, you only had to pass through a metal detector to get onto a flight. You didn't need a photo ID, you didn't need to remove your shoes, you didn't need to pass through a body scanner, you could bring liquids on board, and your family could come meet you at the gate. The "no-fly list" didn't even exist.
After Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, and then beefed up security with a series of subsequent measures, none of that is true. Now, law-abiding citizens are subject to a great deal of hassle. A couple years ago, my wife, who is not a terrorist, was pulled aside and subjected to a pat-down search because she mistakenly included some soup in the meal she packed for her flight.
Whether or not one agrees with all these measures, it's very clear why they exist: to deny a tiny number of dangerous maniacs access to a dangerous weapon. That is the precise inconvenience Scalise refuses to impose on gun owners.
As ridiculous as Scalise's assumption that 9/11 did not lead to federal restrictions on access to airplanes is, don't sleep on the next part of his answer. ("There was a conversation about connecting the dots. How we can try to figure out if there are signs we can see to stop the next attack from happening.") In fact, the Bush administration connected the dots from the 9/11 attacks to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which had absolutely no connection to the attacks at all. Not a very smart comparison!
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You can't keep a determined maniac from obtaining a weapon.
Our war on drugs worked, why wouldn't a war on weapons work?
It is interesting how Boebert and now Scalise do not understand that they are making the gun regulators case for them
There is only one pediatrician in Uvalde. Today, that doctor told Congess that two of the murdered children in the Robb school massacre had been decapitated by the bullets from an AR-15.
beyond horrible.
Exactly, the condition of a dead body should make all the difference. Just like that teenager that was decapitated by a roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia.
I bet you those who fall in front of a commuter train dont look too good when its over either. What the fuck does that have to do with a mass shooting of 10 year olds?
That's even more sickening than the image of a man shot in the face by an AR-15 that I posted as a comment to an article from npr that I posted about what happens to the human body when it's been shot.
Didn't you bring up the condition of the body in 3.0?
If the government does not want people to have something, that just makes many want it more