TSA!

The beloved TSA was founded on the belief that gross sexual imposition is less awful than mass murder. There are, the good reader is no doubt aware, terrorists who want to kill us. We are supposed to be thankful, therefore, for the government agents who prevent this by molesting us. The humble blogger makes it sound a touch absurd, but there actually is a train of thought, not entirely illogical, whereby one can conclude that getting to second base with random airline passengers will keep them alive. If between a woman’s breasts a bomb can fit, then we must search the cleavage.

There are some who think a little deeper, but only a little. They ask how many gross sexual impositions are required to be more awful than a single murder. With the thousands of intimate pat downs and naked photos (taken by damaging backscatter X-Ray equipment), how many murders must be prevented to be worth it? This low level of oppositional thought is typically achieved by journalists and TV pundits, as one would expect.

Economists and those adept at thinking economically go a bit deeper. They point out that TSA’s patriotic groping scares passengers away, leading some to take more dangerous transportation to wherever they are going. They envision an amount X that represents dead flyers if no precautions were taken. They further envision an amount A of people deterred from flying. B amount of these deterred passengers will forego their trip, and of the ones who still go, an amount C will avoid a deadly accident. D amount of people in deadly accidents will simply take the place of someone else in an accident that was going to happen anyway. Which, then, is larger, X or (A-(B + C + D))?

A few others think to add the bad of the still ongoing gross sexual impositions to the potential bad of increased overall deaths and conclude that (A-(B + C + D)) + Molestation is worse than X. The people from the side that believes a cheap, unwanted feel plus naked photography go well with aviation insist that (A -(B + C + D)) is smaller than X. The lines and equations are drawn: with TSA we get (A-(B + C + D)) + Molestation; without TSA we get X. Now how can one go about obtaining a reasonable solution?

With no great amount of modesty, the humble blogger would like to announce that he has solved the problem.

Let us assume a best case scenario for the pro-TSA side. Let us assume that (B + C + D) = A, in other words that no extra traffic deaths come from deterred flyers. We are thus left with X vs. Molestation. Now let us determine what value to plug in for X.

It is not as difficult as it might at first seem. Though an individual terrorist does not announce to the world that he has been deterred from blowing up an airplane, the aggregate actions of the entire group of terrorists reveal certain things about them, including population size. One must only realize that a terrorist thwarted at the airport is still left with a bomb in his hands and hate in his heart. Are we to believe that he gives up, goes home, disassembles the bomb and lives peacefully forever more? Nothing could be more absurd! The terrorist who avoids the airport is yet left with numerous possibilities for inflicting murder on the society he hates. He can take his bomb on a bus; he can take it into a football stadium; he can take it on a train or a subway; he can take it to a shopping mall. The fact that the airports are closed to him does him no great inconvenience. Have we removed from his reach those Americans in the air? Why, he shall simply concern himself with those Americans still on the ground. A single wisp of cloud in the sky does more to bother astronomers than TSA does terrorists.

At this point, the good reader may be tempted to form his conclusion. TSA cannot prevent terrorist attacks, merely divert them to different areas. Therefore, TSA should be abolished. This is of course correct, but let us make the conclusion even more robust. After all, though the death total is unaffected, it is shifted to a different part of the population. Not everyone flies with the same frequency, so those who fly often may still feel that, though the country as a whole isn’t any safer, they themselves are. We can dispel this notion.

The key is to track the change in non-aviation terrorist attacks. Though there may be seasonal, annual, even decadal cycles in these attacks, if we look at the change in frequency of such attacks since TSA has been in operation, we can get a rough estimate of how many extra deaths are occurring through bus bombings, basketball game explosions and the like. If, for instance, there were twenty non-aviation terrorist attacks per year before TSA, and 25 per year since, we can conclude that these five extra attacks are likely ones that would have occurred in airports and on airplanes but have been diverted through the diligent crotch grabbing of the men and women in black and blue.

Since the humble blogger could not find comprehensive data more recent than 2005, let us consider the four years before and the four years after the inception of TSA. The FBI lists 25 terrorist incidents after TSA and 36 in the four years before it. These are non-aviation terrorist events, so the TSA cannot be credited with the drop in terrorist attacks. However, the vast majority of these attacks are arson and vandalism committed by animal lovers and eco wackos, not the sort of thing airlines have ever had to deal with. When we look only at non-aviation, non-animal rights terrorist incidents, we get 12 before and 4 after. As difficult as it might be for some to believe, terrorism is down, not up.

But what if we discount those terrorist incidents from Puerto Rican nationalists who don’t operate in the mainland United States? And let’s throw out the anti-abortion crazies who certainly aren’t being diverted from airline violence. Now we are left with 6 before and 4 after. Our conclusion can only be that if terrorists are being diverted from attacking airlines, it’s not showing up anywhere else. X is likely zero. This means that TSA has likely done nothing to protect the lives of any Americans from terrorists, because there doesn't appear to be any terror displacement.

Airline passengers aren’t getting any increased safety from TSA, they’re just getting molested.