Pre-9/11 mentality alert: Obama cancels program allowing pilots to carry guns

Pre-9/11 mentality alert: Obama cancels program allowing pilots to carry guns

Don’t you just feel safer already reading this?

Now President Obama is quietly ending the federal firearms program, risking public safety on airlines in the name of an anti-gun ideology.

The Obama administration this past week diverted some $2 million from the pilot training program to hire more supervisory staff, who will engage in field inspections of pilots.

This looks like completely unnecessary harassment of the pilots. The 12,000 Federal Flight Deck Officers, the pilots who have been approved to carry guns, are reported to have the best behavior of any federal law enforcement agency. There are no cases where any of them has improperly brandished or used a gun. There are just a few cases where officers have improperly used their IDs.

Fewer than one percent of the officers have any administrative actions brought against them and, we are told, virtually all of those cases “are trumped up.”

… Arming pilots after Sept. 11 was nothing new. Until the early 1960s, American commercial passenger pilots on any flight carrying U.S. mail were required to carry handguns. Indeed, U.S. pilots were still allowed to carry guns until as recently as 1987. There are no records that any of these pilots (either military or commercial) ever causing any significant problems.

Screening of airplane passengers is hardly perfect. While armed marshals are helpful, the program covers less than 3 percent of the flights out of Washington D.C.’s three airports and even fewer across the country. Sky marshals are costly and quit more often than other law-enforcement officers.

OK, so since pilots cannot defend their passengers from Islamic crazies crashing the cockpit trying to go on a suicide mission for Allah, does that mean that Obama will ensure that there will be armed sky marshals on each and every flight?

HA. Of course not! This isn’t a safety issue. Obama apparently couldn’t care less about the safety of the American people. He does, though, have anti-gun extremists and far-left liberals to appease.

Of course, this is just an editorial. There’s been no confirmation of this. But if it is true — and it wouldn’t surprise me if it is — then it just goes to show you that Obama’s got his head stuck firmly in the pre-9/11 sand.

Written by

10 Comments
  • btenney says:

    This President clearly needs his ass kicked until his nose bleeds.
    I am saying so figuratively and anyone who percieves this as a threat can kiss my skinny White Ass.

  • Mat says:

    My guess is that this is only the beginning regarding “gun control.”

  • Mark says:

    With a middle name like Hussein, he wouldn’t like to see any of his tribe being shot at. Barry is slowly but surely dragging us back to Sept. 10, 2001.

  • That is just crazy! Oh shoot let’s get rid of those silly door locks while we are at it.

  • Bobv says:

    So you can’t trust pilots with guns, that could be used to kill a few people, but you can trust them with 747s, which can be used to kill thousands?

  • Cousin Dave says:

    Indeed, it was once required of pilots who flew any aircraft containing a U.S. Mail shipment to carry a gun. And back in the day, the Post Office routinely flew mail shipments on commercial airlines, so that was nearly all of them. Although, as Earnest Gann has written, some of the pilots didn’t take it very seriously. (That’s one place whre the post-9/11 program was an improvement — the required training.) But I’ve spent some time looking into aircraft accident and incident records back to the 1940s, and I’ve never found a report of any incident being cause by a pilot abusing his weapon.

  • MarkS says:

    I’ll be impressed when Obama disallows the Secret Service from carrying firearms.

  • Cylar says:

    Pilots carrying guns, and using them to defend the aircraft during a hijacking attempt? Are you nuts? A gun could go off and perhaps nick a passenger, or put a hole in the fuselage, causing….slow decompression…which might cause the oxygen masks to drop down and force the plane to descend to a lower altitude. That is a horrid fate.

    No, no, no. It’s much better, once a hijacking has been reported, to scramble an F-16 to chase the passenger aircraft. That way, when negotiations fail, the military pilot is forced to kill the entire planeload of people.

    After all, it’s far better to assuredly kill 250 innocent passengers with an air-to-air missile…than take the risk of one or two passengers being hit by a stray bullet in the cabin. Right?

  • Jay says:

    Exactly what is the danger of a pilot having a gun? If the pilot of a commercial airliner suddenly went beserk and decided to kill people, surely he could wipe out the entire plane-load by flying the plane into the ground or the side of a mountain or a building. Or if he wanted to be subtle he could surely tamper with the instruments in some way that no one on board, even with help from air traffic controllers, would be likely to figure out. With a gun, maybe he could shoot one or two people before someone wrestled him to the ground.

    If a pilot is a dangerous maniac, the solution is not to prevent him from carrying a gun on board the plane. It’s to not put him in the cockpit to begin with.

    Hey, sudden thought: If you’re really afraid that the pilot might run amuck and try to kill all the passengers, wouldn’t the smart thing to do be to arm the passengers?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe
Become a Victory Girl!

Are you interested in writing for Victory Girls? If you’d like to blog about politics and current events from a conservative POV, send us a writing sample here.
Ava Gardner
gisonboat
rovin_readhead