First, with any process like this, you have to err on one of two sides. Allowing unqualified participants in to make certain you don’t disqualify those who shouldn’t be a part, or disallowing a few qualified individuals to keep any unqualified out. With this program, for what should be obvious reasons, the err is on the side of safety.

Let me ask you something. You have to trust someone with security information as part of this program. When someone who is disqualified goes straight to the press, you know what that tells us? We made the right choice.

Just because someone can handle a gun does not make them qualified for the program. Allowing someone to become a pilot up to the commercial level and handle an aircraft is not in our hands. Allowing someone to take a firearm on board is.

Many of you have passed judgment on the program from a one page article. Many of you have somehow used this one page article to color many other aspects of reality, such as health care and liberals. That kind of thinking is something not wanted in an officer at any level. The bias and willing to judge with few details. Shoot first, ask questions later.

What you don’t know is the supporters of the program in the Senate and Congress have largely been Democrats. Feel free to investigate how your favorite representative has supported the program and who is currently trying to get rid of it.

1. Yes, being a competent firearms instructor who deals with tactical use of firearms DOES qualify you to carry a firearm on a plane. An airplane is no different than any other crowded area in terms of carrying, deploying, or using firearms. The fact that you don’t know that suggests that you’re not familiar with the issue.

2. The pilot you smeared was doing what the TSA requires of ALL FFDO pilots when he fired his weapon. He shouldn’t have been doing it–it’s dangerous, unnecessary, and a clear violation of the rules of gun safety–but it was the TSA bureaucracy that decreed that pilots would not be allowed to fly armed unless they inserted the hasp of a padlock through the trigger guards of loaded weapons at the end of each and every flight.
Again, anyone who understands gun safety should refuse to do that, but it’s not much of a defense of the TSA, since it was their requirement.
In effect, you’ve bolstered Mrs. Jacobsen’s point here by citing another example of the TSA’s passive-aggressive policy of sabotaging the FFDO program. There is no legitimate safety reason for their policy on putting padlocks through trigger guards; Ockham’s Razor suggests that the requirement exists for the purpose of making it cumbersome and annoying to carry a handgun as a pilot–with the unintended consequence that they also managed to make it dangerous.

Wow, that must have been one hell of a strong security guard. To cut a valve that has thick cast metal, that guard must have been superman. And why would a supervisor in a nuke plant yell for someone to cut a valve and release a lot of pressure or fluid under pressure?

Maybe I’m missing something but this story must have been concocted by someone smoking pot. I just can’t believe this is an excuse for a psych test. But these psychs are out of touch of real life. My credentials are that I work in a chemical manufacturing facility that has its own power plant, so I know what valves look like. And I haven’t seen one that can be cut by a pipe cutter in just seconds.

I suspect the TSA wants another 9/11 so they can make passengers more miserable. Of course if they just singled out the group of animals blowing up airplanes, male muslims, the rest of us could enjoy peace while flying.

But who would want to discriminate against people who are dying to kill us? LOL

Thanks again.

1. pipe cutters laying around a control room
2. a control room so understaffed that security guards are used for extra hands
3. security guards anywhere other than a gatehouse or on the perimeter of the plant

I’ve been in plenty of coal fired power plants but never in a nuclear plant.