Mumbai nightmares

I confess not to be personally worried about terrorism---at my age, I should be worrying more about osteoporosis. Yet I know this view is not widely shared. At a dinner the other night, one of my table companions said that he was willing to accept the trade-off between loss of personal privacy and dignity at airports in exchange for the increase in security that body scans and pat-downs afford. Putting aside the question of whether these security theater measures are effective in preventing and deterring terrorism at 30,000 feet, this view still seems misguided. It assumes that airports and aircraft still remain attractive targets for terrorists. But terrorists seem to have different preferences for attack methodologies. For example, the list of terrorist incidents in 2011 is a mind numbing sequence of suicide bombs, car bombs, ieds, letter bombs, and shootings, including the bombing and mass shooting attack by Breivik in Norway last July. There was one aircraft incident on the list: an attempted airplane hijacking in April:

Alitalia Flight AZ329, an Airbus A321, was flying from Paris to Rome when a man attempted to hijack the aircraft and fly it to Tripoli. The hijacker drew out a small knife but he was overpowered by four passengers and crew. The aircraft landed at Rome were the hijacker was arrested. One flight attendant was slightly injured during the attempted hijacking.

 The attempted hijacker in this case seems to have been deranged.

No, it seems to me that Mumbai 2008 provides the terrorist template to fear. Like school shootings which seemed also to inspire Breivik's demented attacks, a small number of determined terrorists bombed and shot hundreds of people at 11 separate sites over four days---a crowded train station, cafe, theatre, and hotels in which the guests were held hostage, trapped in their rooms like students trapped in classrooms listening for the footsteps of the gunmen coming down the hallway.

Yet, despite the horrific body count (164 dead, more than 300 injured) and the ease with which a small number of gunmen can hold a city hostage, the Mumbai example has not apparently changed American conceptions of terrorism and the strategies for preventing it.Instead, we all act out our roles, as shoeless, scanned and patted down passengers, as bored and clueless TSA agents, as very important officials in the performance piece known as transportation security. Meanwhile, more and more states have open carry laws. So if new would-be Mumbai gunmen carried their weapons into a hotel in Virginia, for example, they couldn't be arrested until they opened fire. Go figure.