Megan has a rather...exercised post about how much she hates airport screening, but I found this comment interesting:
There was a massive line for security screening when I flew back from Las Vegas last August, probably 500 people or more, snaking around through rope barriers. What this snaking meant is that most of the people were clustered together in a relatively small area rather than spread out in a long line. Fortunately it moved quickly, though that's not my point. I started thinking, if I were some crazed suicide bomber, all I'd have to do is set off a powerful shrapnel bomb in the security line and I'd probably kill more people than if I actually brought down an airplane.
My initial thought was that a ground bomb doesn't have the psychological impact of a downed aircraft. Bringing down a plane makes terrorists seem more powerful, capable, deadly -- even if the death toll isn't maximized. Additionally, there's a chilling economic impact, as Americans avoid airports and the country's commerce slows and stumbles.
But maybe that's not true. If you detonated a bomb in a security line -- or, worse, a Wal-Mart -- wouldn't the intrusion of terrorism into a more mundane context be all the scarier? In other words, would three Midwestern suicide bombers loom larger in the American mind than one wrecked plane? My hunch, for reasons I can't quite articulate, is no; that the placement of terror into more impressive contexts allows folks to misrepresent it in their own minds, where the impressions of everyday life are more entrenched and thus trickier to overturn.
