>I can also carry a clown hat all day long and it will keep the pink elephants away.

Not if you just _carry_ it it won't. Everyone knows you have to wear it.

People do occasionally try to blow up airplanes and such. The tactic of hijacking an airplane to crash it into something isn't the only possibility.

If your assertion is that security checks prevent no attacks, then you're implying that no attacker has been discouraged from making an attack due to the presence of security screening. This strikes me as absurd.

There are good arguments to be made that many aspects of security screening are useless, and even that the useful aspects aren't worth what they cost. I would tend to agree with many of those arguments. But to argue that the security screening process as a whole does not prevent any attacks is taking it way too far.

Just look at how incredibly frequent hijackings were in decades past, and how rare they became after basic screening was instituted. It does work to an extent. If you want to attack it, attack it on a cost/benefit basis or attack the more ridiculous bits of it, like banning liquids or screening shoes.

I am not arguing that security checks do not prevent any attack. I am arguing that the additional security checks introduced after 9/11 are not preventing more attacks than there were before 9/11, they are just introducing a way to persecute grannies for having a pair of scissors in their bag.

Really? That's not at all what you said in your original comment at the top of this thread.

That's been tried - that was the plane that crashed on 9/11 heading for Washington(?) Not an ideal outcome.

One can argue that the passenger have reacted too late, after hearing what happened to the other planes.