Thank you for being a voice of reason and rationality. This community among many others has a tendency to attribute things like this to malice or, more often, c

Thank you for being a voice of reason and rationality. This community among many others has a tendency to attribute things like this to malice or, more often, conspiracy. I can't tell you how many times I see people thinking along these lines and I just think to myself "Has anyone ever heard of Occam's Razor?". An online petition is meaningless to the government if they want to ignore it. We also forget that a petition is more like a very strong request or a demand but no one is obligated fulfill what the petition requests. So even if this petition got a million signatures all it means is that we presumably let whoever is in charge of watching these petitions know that x number of people feel this way. One last major point I want to make is that the government is far more inept than people give it credit for. It's funny how people see the government as either completely incompetent or as some all powerful entity that can exert power over anything and do anything. For example, we have people that believe the USPS is totally broken and the US government is too incompetent to fix it's own postal system. Then, by the same token we have others that believe 9/11 was a massive conspiracy that was masterfully executed. In both cases the problem comes down to the government being run by fallible humans who make mistakes. Very very last thing to think about: to some, the TSA petition was incredibly important and it's being taken down has been, in their minds, morphed into some kind of conspiracy to keep the people down. Now I ask you what about the other petitions on the site? To some people the TSA petition isn't important but some other random petition is. There are lots of petitions that are just as important to people that do make their signature goal. The point is, people will do gold medal worthy mental gymnastics to explain what they either don't understand or to justify something to themselves. Not everything is a conspiracy. Coincidence is real.