Acting in the usually useless manner, the TSA has announced that all lighters will be banned from carry-on luggage past security checkpoints in airports. This announcement was expected since congress passed a law last December mandating the change. Matches, however, will still be allowed. So anyone who wishes to smoke must now bring their matches (up to 4 books are allowed) and they will be required to buy a lighter once they arrive in their destination. The TSA actually went further than Congress asked them to. The law only prohibited butane, which is a flammable gas. My Zippo (probably the last great thing Made in the USA) runs on naphtha, a liquid fuel, but TSA decided to make everything as simple as possible and ban ALL lighters, included electric ones. The good news for smokers though (other than the match exemption) is that lighters are over 90% plastic and probably won't show up in the x-ray machine and even if they do, a simple "oops, I didn't know that" will spare people any problems with the law (not that I'm advocating breaking TSA's important rules). Once they decide to ban matches too (which they will), they'll really have fun enforcing that one, since a book of matches contains ZERO metal, except for a little staple to hold it together, and a box of matches doesn't even have that.
I personally think this law is just there to piss people off, since a determined terrorist can still bring a match or just hide a lighter really well.
Here's my proposal for airline security: allow everyone licensed to do so (such as myself) to carry a gun on the plane. Just think, if one law abiding citizen had carried a pistol on one of those planes on 9/11, one of the Twin Towers would probably still be standing. It's worth thinking about. A foreigner cannot get a permit to carry, so those guys would have been prohibited from having one on the plane. They pull out their box cutters, I pull out my .45. Who wins?
2005-03-11
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