In all of the reports I’ve seen of TSA security oversteps, this one might just be the worst I’ve seen — and the most difficult to watch. It’s bad enough to see TSA screeners groping adults. Now they’ve stooped to accosting a terrified, screaming three-year-old.

As a parent, how would you react if this was your child? Most parents teach our children that no one is allowed to touch them. They’re not exactly used to having people pat them down, nor are they capable of understanding why a rude stranger would be forcibly touching them all over their body. For a child, that must be terrifying. Are we supposed to let our children think its acceptable for strangers to touch them against their will?

In this video you can see the entire problem with our airport security system. Why did this child need to be patted down? Does she look like she might be a tiny terrorist? Sure, TSA has a policy that if the metal detector beeps twice everyone must be searched, regardless of age. So let’s just terrify children, who cares? As the TSA official stated, it’s not the policy that’s the problem, it’s “how we handle the child”. After all, why should we exercise common sense? The Taliban uses children as human shields, so surely soccer moms from, say, Nebraska, could be doing the exact same thing. And hey, if CAIR has their way, it will only be soccer moms and their children who get patted down. Muslim women wearing hijabs? Nope, sorry. No patdowns for Muslim women. Considering the absurdity of TSA’s current policies, I wouldn’t doubt that they’d find it perfectly acceptable to accost terrified children and let hijab-wearing Muslim women right on through. Figuring out which one would be most likely to smuggle a bomb is irrelevant anyways.

We have to ask ourselves: do we really feel like we’re going to be any safer with these idiots patting down children? We have a security system in place that refuses to profile the people most likely to be terrorists — they could be called racists, heaven forbid. Most of us are reasonable people, and are willing to accept some inconveniences in the name of airline safety. But these aren’t mere inconveniences anymore, and as we saw last Christmas, they aren’t keeping us any safer. There is one group of people responsible for every incidence of terror in the skies, and I’m pretty sure that three-year-olds are not included in that group.