Airlines & Homeland Security
It is an indication of the woeful state of security at U.S. airports that a mentally ill passenger has been shot dead in Florida by a federal air marshal. While we can all agree that it is a very bad idea to claim to have a bomb in your luggage – and has been since the first airline hijacking – a deranged person acting erratically should probably not end up dead, either, especially when the marshals pursuing him are themselves being pursued by the man’s poor wife, crying out that he’s ill, that he’s off his medication.

Since September 11, thousands of marshals have been added to the original staff of just over thirty who protected our air passengers, but this kind of panic scenario is highly suggestive of entirely inadequate training. (Actually, I’m fairly surprised it wasn’t some poor National Guardsman who ended up killing this guy, except that they’re probably mostly in Iraq at this point, rather than staffing the metal detectors at the check-in gates. That’s been a rapid-fire tragedy waiting to happen.) That this is the first such incident is worth being thankful for, but it should not have played out the way it did. It’s as much a “setback” in America’s defenses against terrorism as the recent Florida court case (and what’s with that state, anyway?), and equally indicative of the failure of the Bush big-stick approach to, well, everything.