The TSA has taken the “welcome step” of exempting kids 12 and under from shedding shoes, Jon Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune tells us. Alas, “Older children and adults will still be required to take off their shoes during screening because the possibility of terrorists concealing explosives in shoes remains a major threat, the TSA said.”
Jon is a columnist whose “topics” include the TSA, “Transportation Accidents, Air and Space Accidents,” and others I wasn’t curious enough to explore. So we might expect him to know — and to inform his readers — that “terrorists concealing explosives in shoes” is not and never has been a “major threat.” We also might suppose that any columnist at a major daily who concentrates on aviation, let alone “accidents” therein, would read such journals to the trade as Air and Safety Week. If he did, he would learn that besides the daft Richard Reid, there have been only two known attempts to bring down a plane by blowing off one’s own feet, both of which failed; I, a free-lance writer without the staff and resources of the Chicago Tribune behind me, not only read Air and Safety Week, I’ve also written about the extreme rarity of shoe-bombs. Several times.
But that’s why Jon “works” for the corporate media and I don’t.
8:19 am on October 11, 2011
