Unkindest Cut

I think we're overdoing security at airports and applaud measures to allow items like small knives back on planes.  But even this slight opening is too much for Senator Chuck Schumer.  This is the man who, years ago, demanded the Justice Department investigate the high price of breakfast cereal (and, amazingly, is still proud of it), and he continues to save us from phantom problems.

He says "very small knives [were] used by Mohammed Atta and other hijackers on 9/11" and the TSA "ought to immediately repeal this rule."

Schumer held up a shampoo bottle and an X-Acto knife and said that he had a hard time understanding how the TSA considers the small blade less dangerous than liquid personal care products, which remain banned in containers over certain volumes. "Everyone is befuddled," Schumer said.

[....] Schumer said that if the TSA didn't reinstate the ban on small knives before then, he would consider legislative action, which he expects to have broad bipartisan support.

Chuck, pay attention.  Even if you think a Swiss Army knife is as dangerous as a box cutter, the truth is no one can take over a plane any more with a blade of any sort. (Or a gun, for that matter.) Anyone who pulls out a knife will be swamped by passengers and beaten senseless.  Certainly he can't get into the locked cockpit.

Can he take a slash at passengers?  Sure.  He can also punch them, choke them or knock them unconscious with his laptop.

You know what is dangerous?  Alas, though it's highly unlikely it'll happen, explosives of the kind the shoe bomber attempted to use--the kind that can be hidden in a bottle of shampoo--are the greatest threat for a passenger to take down a plane these days. The TSA knows this and would rather concentrate on finding the deadly stuff while trying to make flying just a bit less unpleasant.

By the way, does Schumer even have to fly commercial? Or do taxpayers pick up the tab as he crusades around the country protecting us from ourselves?