nation

Of all the stupid things I have heard of, this takes the cake. If you are found with a knife, you DON'T GET TO TAKE THE PLANE RIDE. No exceptions. Then have the media post the peoples names in the newspapers. I'll bet they remember to leave the knives at home the next time they fly. If not, then no plane ride but you get to spend 10 days in jail.

Flying with a knife now is no more dangerous than going to a mall. The cockpit doors are locked and all this security theater is useless. Pistole and Janet have NO clue how to run security OR protect our country. They along with the other 60,000 time wasters at the TSA and DHS need to be fired.

Small knives are simply not an issue. It's explosives that the TSA needs to be concerned with. No one today could ever take over a plane with some tiny knife. The passengers would promptly overpower anyone crazy enough to try it. And it's also time to stop strip searching granny, and start doing some actual profiling and interviewing people. That is MUCH more effective in stopping any threats. Just ask the Israelis.

"Flying with a knife now is no more dangerous than going to a mall." right, alot of terrorists hijack malls...box cutters not allowed, but knives are. so accordding to the TSA it's all right to loose some flight attendents, passengers to terrorists..

There haven't been any attempts to hijack a plane with sharp objects since 9/11. Guess what, there weren't any such attempts before that either. The 9/11 hijackings were an anomaly that will never work again, even without the TSA. When did the United States stop being "the land of the free and the home of the brave"?

minn12, we do not need to put every passenger on trial to prove their innocence before they board a plane. It won't work anyway. The number of terrorists relative to the number of people flying is so miniscule they will be lost in a sea of innocent suspects. Attempts to discern someone's intentions from an interview will be no more accurate than a polygraph which is correct about 70% of the time. For the sake of argument let's imagine the interviews were correct 99% of the time. That means the TSA would suspect 1% of passengers. At MSP that would be 900 innocent people singled out per day. How many terrorists try to board a plane at MSP each day? Zero. So 900 innocent people per day would either be barred from flying or they would be waived through security despite suspicions. In the real world, interviews will be nowhere near 99% accurate.

Martin 64 : And who's tax money will be spent to jail those offenders like you say?

One of the speakers in the story says that there have been no knife attacks, so the rules are working and we shouldn't go backwards. Well, no planes have blown up either...so we should stop worrying about that, too?? I still believe in my heart, however, that we are overly security conscious. A plane going down is a price of the freedom we believe we have. To my mind, the terrorists have won--they have made us VOLUNTARILY give up our rights to fly freely and without fear. They are the giant bogeyman that we spend billions of dollars trying to stop--they don't have to do anything else since 9/11.

It's kind of neat to know that some of the people here feel their fellow passengers are expendable. Little do they think that THEY are someone else's "fellow passenger."

What if hijackers threaten to start stabbing passengers until the pilot opens the door? 2000 knifes a day x 3 minutes each = 100 hours of additional work x 15 $/Hr = 1500 dollars. I think the government can afford to do this. If people can't be inconvienced a few minutes then they don't deserve to fly. I can think of many more risks policy change causes but I can't think of ANY benefits other than time and $ which are not really material amounts.