January Classes, Bruce Schneier, and Other Miscellany

by Joel Rosenberg
2-Jan-2004

News

A few quick bits of news and short essays, that don't quite fit anywhere else.

Department of "I Told You So"

A Chicagoan, who recently shot a burglar in his home, has been charged. Let's leave the question of what to do about a burglar in the bedroom for another time—but look at this.

"Billings [the burglar. JR], convicted last year of a similar home burglary in an affluent Minneapolis suburb, is now in the Cook County Jail with bail set at $3 million."

As some of us predicted would happen in the wake of the MCPPA, Billings followed a small but real trend among criminals by moving his operation down to friendlier territory, where he could reasonably expect to practice his chosen profession more safely.

I guess that's too bad for residents of Illinois, but I'm perfectly willing for it to be their problem, rather than mine.

Ohio goes "shall issue."

From The Plain Dealer:

Concealed-weapons bill heads for Taft's desk 01/08/04
Julie Carr Smyth
Plain Dealer Bureau
Columbus- A bill lifting Ohio's 145-year-old ban on carrying concealed weapons cleared both the House and Senate on Wednesday with virtually no debate.

It will become law 90 days after Gov. Bob Taft's promised signature. The Republican governor said the bill "balances the Second Amendment rights I have strongly supported with public safety and public records concerns."

Neat. The big hassle in Ohio was over the confidentiality of permit holders' records, and the supporters of the bill had to compromise, or face a veto that they might not have been able to override. I'm not at all happy with the compromise—reporters will be able to get access to the list of permit holders, but nobody else. Sure—but at least they got the bill passed.

There'll be time to revisit that after somebody, either a reporter or somebody posing as one, posts the list on the Internet.

It's a bad idea. Why on earth would you want, say, a woman's stalker to be able to find out if she's got a carry permit? Shouldn't it, well, come as a surprise to him?

Fortunately, we don't have this problem in Minnesota; in Minnesota, permit data is confidential, government data, as it should be.

But you can expect the antis in Ohio to have conniption fits.

But, really, they can relax; the sky isn't going to fall there, either.

January classes

Well, New Years is over, and it's time to get back to work. I'll be scheduling a Beginner's Class toward the end of the month; if you're interested, email me.

As an experiment, I'm trying a weekday class this month, for folks who either can't get a weekend day off, or who would rather take their training as kind of a break during the week. Unfortunately, I've had to leave the Bloomington American Legion; the powers-that-be there found that the gun room was so frequently filled up with carry permit training classes that they raised their rates by, literally, 100%. Their call, obviously; fortunately for you and me, there's other good venues, some of them even better geographically for getting out to Burnsville Pistol Range for the qualification.

Classes have been running on the smallish lately, so feel free to give a call at the last moment and see if there's a place for you and a friend, if you'd like. I won't cancel a class because there's too few people signing up... unless, of course, there's nobody signing up. Not that I'm expecting that.

Repeal; Relax—It Isn't Going to Happen

Occasionally, I get email from somebody worrying that the MPPA is going to be repealed this next session. I think they've been listening to the antis—who, more and more, are acknowledging not only that that's not going to happen soon, but never will. No shall issue law has ever even come close to repeal.

Realistically, the antis need all of four things in order to be able to repeal the MPPA: a working majority in the State House, a working majority in the State Senate, a governor who wouldn't veto the repeal bill, and horror stories around permit holders.

They need all four. They've got precisely none.

Instead, they're pinning their hopes on some of the lawsuits from the churches, but those are a dead-on-arrival issue; the only thing left in the lawsuit that could happen is that churches might be able to use their own choice of language to forbid permit holders to carry ("Thou Shalt Not Have Handguns to Protect Thyself While Here") or keep permit holders out of their parking lots. That's it. The complaint that the MPPA was part of an omnibus bill won't fly; the court can't afford to void omnibus bills, given how very much of necessary legislation only gets passed that way.

So, for once, I get to say the same thing to folks on my side of the issue that I keep repeating to the antis: relax; the sky isn't going to fall.

Check back often, though

I really should write a weekly column, and I'll try to move to that later. In the meantime, I'll try to update these monthly notes, from time to time, and add an essay or two. There's one on the hysterical hoplophobia that's taken over the Minnesota Science Fiction Society that's kind of begging for an essay, and I haven't been doing enough essays, I know.

Speaking of which...

Honest, I Love My People, but . . . Oy.

Unfortunately, I'm informed that there is a synagogue posting "Defenseless Jews Inside" signs in the metro area. (No, that's not what the signs actually say, but . . . ) Argh. Hope that the local equivalent of Buford Furrow trips and breaks his neck on the way in.

Then again, maybe they're lying, and he won't get three steps inside. I don't really believe that, but I can hope.

Honest, I love the Jewish people. Really, I do. But when it comes to gun issues, there's more than a little of what my grandmother would have called goyisher kopf going around. A gun is a tool; that's all. In some sorts of situations, it's an indispensable tool—you could, alas, get out an ouija board and ask Dru Sjodin about that, alas, as she didn't have one—but that's all it is.

I'd like to think that anti-gun hysteria is a liberal thing; I'm a neocon, so that would be comforting. But, alas, it isn't; going back to when we actually had a Civil Rights movement in this country, many of the Freedom Riders rode armed, and all of the ones who were murdered by the Klan didn't. Even these days, a goodly number of folks I know in the self-defense movement are liberal on social issues. (Actually, fwiw, so am I, on most. I'd find it awfully hypocritical to think that it's okay for a rape victim to get an abortion without permission, while thinking that there's something wrong with her being able to carry a gun to protect herself against a rapist in the first place.)

Which leads me to Bruce Schneier's essay.

Bruce Schneier on Guns in Cockpits: A Quick Fisking

I don't know how I overlooked this when it first came out. Bruce Schneier's rant on arming pilots is the sort of ugly thing that happens when an expert in one field first assumes that his expertise transfers to others, and then worsens the problem by letting his prejudices, or perhaps his spouse, do his thinking for him.

A few introductory points. Bruce Schneier is a world-famous expert on cryptography and computer security, who has parlayed that into quite a lot of fame on general issues of security. His monthly newsletter, sent free for the asking, blasts his thoughts to some tens of thousands of subscribers from the very server on which ellegon.com lives, by the way. (The world is a small place.)

In many cases, his expertise, combined with his often excellent mind, serves him quite well.

Alas—yes, I'm saying "alas" too much, but I'm immeasurably saddened by all of this—he's got a painfully stereotypical New York liberal Jew's view of handguns and firearms—the sort of "take one part fear, add two parts loathing, mix in a lot of hysteria, and then loudly assume that all intelligent people share your phobia" thing that I've discussed endlessly.

Think Woody Allen without the macho.

In fact, when the MPPA passed in Minnesota, he made loud noises about not only leaving Minnesota, but the entire United States. (He quietly stopped talking so loudly about that fairly soon after, and hasn't moved.) And he's joined literally all but one of Minnesota's anti-gun zealots by declining to put up a "This Is A Gun-Free Home" sign on his home. Wise of him; why should he advertise to would be home invaders that they've got a soft target there? (In the computer world, they call this "security by obscurity." It works well, as long as nobody ever pays any attention.)

For my sins, I was, at the time Schneier's "go to guy" (his term, honest, not mine) on weapons-related matters. The notion of a billy club or taser was mine, sort of. Mea culpa, as the rebbes say. (Well, no, they don't. But...) In my own defense, the question I was asked was what weapons— absolutely excluding guns, no matter how sensible I thought the idea of an armed pilot was—that I'd recommend for last-ditch defense in the door of the cockpit.

He admitted, at the time, that he was utterly unwilling to consider solving a problem if the solution involved arming anybody with a firearm.

Which pretty much guaranteed which way the piece would go.

Although, even given that, it didn't have to be this bad.

At least he didn't go with his initial idea of giving the pilots pepper spray; do I have to point out how bad an idea it would be to dispense a cloud of pepper spray in an airplane's cockpit? I did, then.

The problem with somebody who doesn't know anything about the issues looking at the problem from a systems approach is classic: garbage in, garbage out. If you either miss or add complexities to the system, you end up with as silly conclusions as Bruce does here. In this sort of thing it's not just what you don't know that can screw you up, it's what you know that just ain't so. Having watched Hopalong Cassidy as a kid doesn't exactly qualify Schneier as an expert on firearms issues.

It's worth looking at. You'll be hard put to find a better-written example of somebody leveraging nonexistent expertise, assuming his conclusions, and ignoring the topic at hand—which, remember, is arming pilots to prevent erstwhile hijackers from taking over the cockpit, and ramming the plane into buildings.

"If I ran an airline, I would worry more about accidents involving passengers, who are much less able to survive a bullet wound and much more likely to sue."

Well, sure, on a day-to-day basis, kinda. Although what makes Schneier think that a typical passenger is more or less able to "survive a bullet wound" than a terrorist is more of that nonexistent expertise being presented as fact. A single bullet is, in this context, almost certain to result in death if it enters the brain, the heart and/or lungs, or breaks enough major arteries, and unlikely to otherwise, given rapid medical response; a hijacker is not particularly likely to have an armored aorta, after all. (And who is more likely to get rapid first aid? A downed passenger, or a downed hijacker?)

But put that aside—remember the context that we're talking about here: a last-ditch cockpit-door stand against a plane being hijacked, after all other countermeasures have failed. Only an idiot, or an anti-gun zealot, is going to worry about injuries to passengers or lawsuits over passenger injuries in the context of preventing a plane from been hijacked and slammed into the nearest convenient large building. It's like worrying about place settings on the Titanic—just after it's hit the iceberg.

It gets worse, though, when we get into the "real dangers."

"How does the pilot get the gun?"

Well, there's any number of ways. One of the simplest ones would be to just use the same procedures that air marshals use to get their guns on the plane: they carry them, in their holsters, concealed by their covering garments. They present proper ID at the proper places, and just plain carry them. A more conservative approach—and the one that's actually being used—is to have the pilots carry their guns aboard the plane in a locked gunbox. The pilot and the gunbox are safely ensconced on the flight deck, with the door locked, before the plane ever takes off.

Still, let's turn to his theoretical worry. Does he really think that it's easy to spot a "gun on a hip" when concealed by a jacket- or suit-coat? I don't know anybody who spends more time on airplanes than Schneier does, but he's never reported spotting an air marshal, although it's statistically absurd to expect that he's never been on a plane with one. Why? Well, they carry reasonably discreetly, and even if Schneier was looking for one, he wouldn't find one. (He's never spotted me carrying, either, and, except when I was at his wedding, he's never seen me unarmed—when I attended his wedding, some years ago, I wanted to have more than a few drinks, and just checked my handgun with hotel security. And he thinks that I carry frequently, in spite of being told that I carry everywhere it's legally permissable.)

Problem? Nah. Not in reality—and this is a key point— remember that the pilot is not walking around in the airport with a sign saying, "hi there: I'm one of the few pilots allowed to carry a gun in the cockpit." Even in my hypothetical case, he's unlikely to be made as carrying—and, if that's a concern, the pilot could always be required to carry in Thunderwear or some other impossible-in-practice-to-detect carry method.

In reality, the gun case goes into the pilot's flight case, which stays with him anyway, until he gets to the flight deck. The only time he's parted from it is when, say, he goes outside the flight deck to use the bathroom—and it's still in that locked case. Somebody unauthorized—say, the flight engineer—who gets at the gun case is still faced with the problem of opening it.

That non-problem solved—then let's remember that it's only Schneier's utter unfamiliarity with the basics of concealment and storage, like gunboxes, that makes it a problem in the first place—we go on to the next.

"Second, we need a procedure for storing the gun on the airplane."

Schneier multiplies nonexistent problems, and a mathematical wizard should know that zero times zero is still, well, zero. Remember, the purpose of the pilot carrying the gun is not to take it out into the main cabin to solve problems of unruly passengers, or even terrorists. (In fact, one of my students was one of the few pilots to go jump through all the hoops of the training program -- they spend a lot of time discussing that, even though it's obvious to anybody except a computer security expert.) The purpose is to prevent the hijacker from getting onto the flight deck to seize control of the airplane, when all other precautions and countermeasures have already failed. Worrying about the hijacker not only seizing control of the airplane so that he can ram it into, say, the Sears Tower but also getting a handgun brings us back to the place settings on the Titanic problem.

In practice, the pilot stores the gun in the gunbox, and only takes it out if he needs to. He doesn't go walking about the cabin with a gun "on his hip." The air marshals do, by the way—and while cops frequently have problems with guns being taken away from them, the problem is almost exclusively one of uniformed cops, or plainclothes police been making arrests—that's the time when perpetrators know that they've got a possible gun to grab.

"Third, we need a system of training pilots in gun handling and marksmanship."

Sure. But he makes it sound like that's a big deal, and that's his unfamiliarity with guns talking. There's nothing wrong with knowing nothing more about guns than what you see on Magnum PI—until, like Schneier, one starts making pronouncements about them. Some activities involving handguns are very difficult, and require great innate ability and/or much training; things like, say, long-distance bulleye shooting, or dynamic entry to perform a hostage rescue. Some activities require little more than basic familiarization and not-horribly-substandard eye-hand coordination. In this case, we're not talking about teaching snap-shooting to the braincase in a crowded cabin—we're talking about a situation where the hijackers are coming through the door, just a few feet away, and all that's necessary, in that situation is for the armed pilot to point the gun at the door the moment that it starts to open, and keep pulling the trigger until he hears clicks; then reloading and repeating. Sure, bullets could go past the hijackers -- and, at least some of the time, they likely will—and quite possibly injure or kill innocent passengers. That's unfortunate, but it's utterly irrelevant -- remember, absent the hijackers being stopped, all the passengers are dead, as are many hundreds, or perhaps thousands, on the ground.

In practice, all the pilot really needs to do in terms of gun handling under normal circumstances is to, just in the interests of gun safety, open the box when he first gets possession of it (say, before leaving his home), verify that it's loaded, and then close and lock the box. The only other time that he may need to open it is if he's got a concern that the door is about to be breached.

Schneier's next paragraphs are kind of a doozy. Are kind of doozies. Whatever.

"Giving pilots guns is a disaster waiting to happen."

If so, it's been waiting for a long time. It wasn't all that long ago that pilots could, routinely, carry guns in the cockpit, without any federal restrictions at all.

"The current system spends a lot of time and effort keeping weapons off airplanes and out of airports."

Well, no. Weapons are not kept out of airports—and I'm not quibbling about the distinction between "weapons" and "guns," although I could. Let's just talk about guns. Schneier doesn't know that it's perfectly legal, and utterly common, for permit holders to carry in airports—just as long as they don't try to take them through security. Unless I'm going through security, I always have my handgun with me. That's not particularly because of the terrorism problem; I just make it a point to carry, all of the time, wherever it's lawful and sensible.

Guns aren't kept off of planes, either. And I'm not just talking about the air marshals, either. Shipping guns on airplanes has always been commonplace—every time I go to another state where my carry permit's valid, my gun comes along with me, in the very same airplane in which I travel. (Granted, it flies in the baggage compartment—which is, by the way, while not easily accessible from the passenger compartment, not utterly inaccessible, either. We could, if we wanted to miss the point as much as Schneier does, worry about the possibility of a terrorist breaking into the cargo compartments to retrieve a handgun legally shipped by himself or a confederate, but let's not; a hijacker intending to use a gun to take over a plane will just smuggle it into the passenger compartment.)

If you're starting from an hysterical, superstitious, and, well, crazy position that guns are animate objects the mere presence of which sends out bad karmic vibrations, this is a horrible thing, and no wonder that Schneier tries not to think about it. If you're starting from the position that a gun is an inanimate tool, with certain physical characteristics, it's not a big deal.

But, of course, we can quickly see where Schneier is coming down:

"the proposed scheme would inject thousands of handguns into that system."

Ah, the problem of concretized metaphor. The problem isn't the presence or absence of a handgun, not even on a plane. Guns are tools -- and, like all tools, they're useful for some things, and utterly useless for others. As a primarily psychological weapon for persuading a cabinful of passengers not to attack an erstwhile hijacker, their utility ended, fairly early in the day, almost a year before Schneier wrote this piece; that's why we haven't seen hijackings in the US.

But as a tool for preventing a very small number of men from breaching a cockpit door and getting inside, they're likely to be awfully useful.

"There are just too many pilots and too many flights every day; mistakes will happen. Someone will do an inventory one night and find a gun missing, or ten. Someone will find one left in a cockpit. Someone may even find one on a seat in a terminal."

This comes under the heading of, "if so, so what"? A gun, or a gunbox, is found to be missing, somewhere. And? Cops, alas, lose or misplace guns all the time. As long as this doesn't happen in the security zone of the airport, it's not at all important. If the gun is lost inside the security zone, it's lost while it's inside the gunbox, presenting additional difficulties for the person who finds it to do anything bad with it. If you're going to insist on worrying about guns being lost inside the security zone, it's much more sensible to worry about one of the air marshals leaving his gun in an airport bathroom—their guns aren't kept in gun boxes.

But do remember that pilots' guns aren't special sorts of demons, different from—presumably worse than—the usual sorts of demons that Schneier thinks guns already are. Even if, say, a gun finds its way onto a plane in the possession of some unauthorized person, that can happen any time. The Feds are constantly doing tests of their own systems, and they find that more than half the time, their testers are able to smuggle guns into the security zone of the airport. Hell, with permission, and an afternoon in a friend's basement shop, I'd expect to be able to do much better than that. A terrorist who wants to smuggle a gun on the plane has many easier ways to do it than some preposterously complicated plot involving trying to figure out which pilots have gunboxes, and then managing to acquire the gun box without alarming everybody involved—before, remember, the plane ever takes off. (When the plane takes off, the gunbox, along with the gun and pilot, are on the flight deck behind those locked doors.)

"El Al is the most security-conscious airline in the world. Their pilots remain behind two bulletproof doors, and they're unarmed. It's the job of the pilot to land the plane safely, not to engage terrorists in close combat. For that, they rely on sky marshals, crew, and passengers. If pilots have to leave the cockpit to solve a security problem, it's too late."

Well, he's right in that the El ALpilots stay behind the bullet-*resistant* doors, and that their job is to fly the plane, not solve security problems. That's something that should be kept in mind by those involved in setting policy for US airlines' security. (Schneier is right, here and elsewhere, when he argues that the security of the cabin door is the key.)

But, unarmed? That's only a recent development, and only entered into after all of the other security measure were instituted, including the double doors. And that's only viable because, in addition to the armed marshals on the planes, El Al does the kind of screening of passengers that, as Schneier admits, US airlines can't do.

In more than three decades of always-armed pilots, El Al did not have a successful hijacking, nor, despite Schneier's cries of "disasters waiting to happen," did any of his vague disasters happen.

Meanwhile, despite hassles from an Administration that bought into the cries of doom and gloom, there now are armed pilots in cockpits all over the US.

I skipped over the worst part of this essay; I thought I'd been hard enough on a guy who is just, after all, over his head. (Although I've got to wonder: given that he's this bad on stuff I know something about, how trustworthy is he on things where he isn't so obviously over his head? He can't be this bad on computer security... or can he?)

Nah.

"The last thing we want is for an attacker to exploit one of these systems in order to get himself a gun. Or maybe the last thing we want is a shootout in a crowded airport."

Sheesh. Get your eye back on the ball, Bruce. The last thing we need is for another hijacker, or bunch of hijackers, to seize control of a jumbo jet and ram it into a building.

The trouble with experts in one field is that they often have trouble making the—pardon the expression—paradigm shift when looking at another field, even when looking at normal situations. Terrorists attempting to seize a plane to ram it into a building is anything but a normal situation, and it's just plain braindead to talk about what the pilot's normal "job" is, in that context. If that's what's about to happen, it's the job of everybody on the plane to prevent it, and the flight deck—and the pilots and flight engineer on that flight deck—are, necessarily, the very last line of defense. That line of defense hasn't been needed since September 11, 2001, when it failed horribly.

But if it is needed, we've got the choice of either the pilot having to stand in the door, hoping that a taser, or billy club (no pepper spray, please, Bruce!) or prayer will stop a well-trained, highly-motivated group of hijackers . . .

Or turning over control of the airplane to the other pilot, while he turns around and kneels on his seat, intending to put bullets—lots of them; this is no time to count on the "one shot stop"—into the likes of Mohammed Atta and his would-be shahid friends as they try to come through the door.

It takes a "security expert" or a particular kind of fool—or both, of course—to think the first choice is better.

Take a deep breath, Bruce; it'll be okay.

Postscript

Argh. I do miss stuff. A correspondent points out that Schneier's concerns, such as they are, apply far more to the air marshalls than to the pilots.

Which, of course, is true. Air marshalls are, almost all of the time, undercover as passengers, although piercing the veil of their cover is obviously not an insuperable challenge. Either they're always in the rear seats, with their backs up against the bulkhead—a red flag as to who to look at, if you're any erstwhile terrorist—or they're in any of the other seats in the cabin, with potentially untrustworthy people (terrorists, say) sitting behind them. For obvious reasons—the lack of a locked door between them and the putative terrorists—their handguns can't be kept in a locked box, the box concealed in a briefcase, but are kept on their persons. If you're going to worry about a terrorist taking away and using a gun aboard the plane, you should worry a lot more about the air marshalls than about the armed pilots.

Should you be worried? Nah. While Schneier's objections apply much more to the marshalls than they do to the pilots, they're still off the mark....

...particularly when there's an armed pilot behind that bullet-resistant cockpit door.

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