In the context of firearms? Sure that's great from preventing someone that gets a gun in the cabin from shooting the flight crew. Someone shooting the sides of

In the context of firearms? Sure that's great from preventing someone that gets a gun in the cabin from shooting the flight crew. Someone shooting the sides of the plane however is still going to penetrate and at best cause a rapid depressurization of the passenger area (and under the right conditions, a catastrophic failure of part of the fuselage) as you're talking about a 1/8 inch thick bit of aluminum with some fiberglass and plastic between you and it, if one round doesn't fully penetrate from common handgun calibers then a second round in the same spot (and at point blank range that is trivial) will almost certainly get through. Someone that was so inclined could easily fire multiple rounds into the same spot, from their seat, before anyone could react if they were motivated. Even under optimal conditions, you'd probably experience some loss of life purely from the oxygen deprivation in those with preexisting conditions as the flight crew took the plane down low enough for passengers that didn't get masks on to be able to get adequate oxygen. Some people are absolutely crazy and simply want to do harm to others, or just to be infamous which doing harm to others will potentially result in. If TSA only manages to find 1% of hidden firearms/knives/explosives/flammable liquids in baggage, that 1% could be the difference between 0 deaths and 10s or hundreds of deaths. TSA needs to change, sure, a lot of what they do is ineffective. People need to get over their delicate sensibilities and be more comfortable with profiling, profiling works in security settings, just look at El Al. El Al gets thrown under the bus for racial profiling but they just aren't looking at people based on race or accent, they're looking at many things and putting it together big-picture to determine who to look at closer. TSA lacks this training and unfortunately are guilty or racial profiling, like when they detained YouTube personality Jus Reign some years back when he (most likely) was selected for secondary screening because as a Sikh he was wearing a turban. And yes, TSA gets carried away with searching elderly and children quite invasively at times, and this needs improved considerably but x-ray, back scatter, chemical testing, dogs, metal detection, I'm quite fine with this for air travel. If an hour or two of extra inconvenience saves me 8, 16, 32 hours of driving then it is fine. It's an aircraft travelling at tens of thousands of feet above the earth, were something as simple as mercury introduced to a scratch in the aluminum fuselage can cause a catastrophic failure. Where a small fire can easily get out of control and be fatal for the entire flight at worst or just cause respiratory issues from burning plastics for multiple passengers and result in an emergency landing. Or where someone with a small blade can easily take out multiple passengers tens of minutes, or an hour or more from emergency medical response.