The Transportation Security Administration recommended Wednesday that armed law enforcement officers be posted at airport security checkpoints and ticket counters during peak hours after a review of last year’s fatal shooting at Los Angeles International Airport.
The 25-page report to Congress obtained by The Associated Press makes 14 recommendations that do not carry a price tag and are somewhat dependent on local authorities who provide airport security.
While airport security has been beefed up since 9/11, the shooting exposed communication problems and gaps in police patrols that left an LAX terminal without an armed officer for nearly 3 1/2 minutes as a gunman targeted TSA officers with a rifle Nov. 1.
This is the federal machine at its bloated worst: it took a twenty-five page report to say, “TSA sucks!”
What the LAX shooting exposed was the obvious security-soft zone between the unloading curb and the first TSA agent. And the inability of the TSA agents to react to anything other than the flask I may have forgotten in my backpack.
As one who has been flying a lot for decades, I am still a big fan of not getting blown up on my way to work. I wouldn’t mind a more highly trained security force (or more of them) if I thought it helped. The problem almost everyone has with the TSA model is that we don’t think it does most of what it purports to do.
Except keep the airways free from oversized bottles of liquid, of course.
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