6 ms·

As a white guy who was caught accidentally carrying a large knife once through security, at the bottom of a carry-on backpack I'd had since high school, I don't

As a white guy who was caught accidentally carrying a large knife once through security, at the bottom of a carry-on backpack I'd had since high school, I don't think it's in any way essential to use racial or ethnic markers to figure out whether someone is taking something dangerous onto a plane. I didn't even know I was trying to bring a knife onto a plane at a regional airport. There's no reason to think that Sikhs are explicitly going out of their way to hide something.

defrost 9mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- noduerme 9mo ago
  Honestly, I would just give them a pass to carry a ceremonial knife, if they could prove they were Sikhs and not someone pretending to be. But I guess that's why we can't have nice things and why the same rules have to apply to everyone. I think most reasonable people understand that they can't preserve every aspect of their personal beliefs or pride in a situation involving the safety of millions of people flying daily. Carrying a weapon is certainly a bit unusual as a pillar of faith, but there are plenty of others that could also be deemed antipathetic to the well functioning order of a modern society trying to move people safely from A to B. And the same way I would consider trained and licensed gun owners to be a relatively low threat and a rule-abiding group of citizens, that's how I would view Sikhs with their blades (or even more so). So if you're Amish, take a horse. If it's Shabbat, wait til Sunday. If you're the TSA and you want to be more efficient by discriminating, look at people who have no discrenable ideology, or those whose ideology actively conflicts with your mission of preventing attacks.
  - defrost 9mo ago
    Sikh's carrying a knife, a bracelet, a comb, etc. has never bothered me in the slightest in all the decades I've known about this - the Khalistan movement in a particular location during a particular time aside, they're not exactly actual postcards for terrorism (despite what some might think when faced with people and turbans). They always had a pass here in Australia for many years until things tightened up. Not that I'm a fan, but in general Rules are Rules and making exceptions while fair in some senses will be unfair in others <shrug>. Circling back to my initial comment- it is the case that there is an actual reason rather than a made up bit of bullshit, to reasonably suspect that a Sikh might be carrying a knife ... if they are they're almost certain to also have a comb .. so that's handy.
    - noduerme 9mo ago
      okee yeah, and rules are rules, and there's a reason to think that. It would be nice if we lived in a world where rules could be bent in some cases for individuals if they actually posed no theeat, but we all have to deal with the lowest common denominator wanting to cause the most damage, so here we are. I must say, one thing that this reminds me of is what happens if you board an El Al flight. They don't racially profile you, they just ask you some fairly innocuous questions and watch your responses. I assume they have some way of monitoring your blood pressure, heart rate, and pupil dilation at a distance... but this hasn't really changed since the 1980s, when those things had to be read or guessed in realtime by a trained human. They have a phenomenally safe record, for a country under constant terror attacks. My takeaway from flying El Al is that there is a much better way to deal with security, that analyzes and addresses the potentially bad individual motives of anyone getting on a plane, and mostly lets everyone else pass. Which is to say that security in its best form should be almost transparent to people without malicious intentions. Having good intelligence coupled with treating each person as their own potential bomb threat is far superior to superficially treating everyone as a threat and having no real security, and far better than just creating security theater around certain people because they're of one race or ethnicity. But El Al's methods probably don't scale well to the size of US or European air travel, because you need highly trained people to stand there in the airport make those calls on the fly for every single passenger. If I were to guess - I'd guess El Al would let a Sikh bring a blade if they looked him in the eye for 10 seconds and decided he was okay.
  - tsimionescu 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Shadasz 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - defrost 9mo ago
        Hangry, cramped, tired, entitled, redneck is easily #1 on the air rage list. Not exactly an ideology though.
        noduerme 9mo ago
        Air rage != plan to become shahid
        defrost 9mo ago
        Your specific singular focus might blind you to all the other reasons planes have been hijacked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings and potential incidental dangers from unrest in confined spaces.
        noduerme 9mo ago
        @defrost: I apparently can't respond directly to you. It's a mistake to ascribe a singular focus to someone you don't know. There may be one out of ten thousand people in any group who might want to cause chaos or violence, and they may very well have their own reasons. It would be absurd, though, to not acknowledge that there are some "gospels", if you will take that term in the broadest sense possible, or sub-religions, which preach that violence is a path to salvation, and which tend to recruit people for the purpose of violence. There are also some political movements which fill the same vacuum for an aimless, angry human soul without religion. It is not that I have a singular focus on one religion nor one political movement, so much as that the evidence suggests that, currently, some movements have more violent offshoots and a more violent profile. There are a handful of political and religious ideologies in the world that lead to more suicide bombings and hijackings per year than, say, the total number done by believers in Zoroastrianism, Sikhs, Confucians, Hindus, Yazidis, Jews, Buddhists, Libertarians, Democratic Socialists, Freemasons and Christians combined. If you had, for instance, Jim Jones's cult or the Aum Shinrikyo boarding airplanes and blowing them up on a regular basis, and your response was that a person had to be a single-minded bigot to notice the fact that most airplane bombings originated with this particular ideology, then I'd say you were ignoring facts or willfully making excuses for ideologies which brainwashed people into doing those things. Possibly for reasons related to disliking your own society, which is perfectly fair, but certainly not neutral or scientific.
notamario 9mo ago
A Sikh is far more likely to be carrying a little sword than the average population.
- noduerme 9mo ago
  And far less likely to stab someone than the general population. It's not a great analogy, but the same applies to registered concealed carry gun owners. They're not the people who shoot people.
K0balt 9mo ago
Welcome to the club. I inadvertently traveled with not one, but two large box cutters in my carryon satchel for at least 20 flights before I discovered them while searching for some swag. I put them in there for a booth setup in Vegas years prior. Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles. Still screened and detained 100 percent of the time, sometimes for hours, sometimes having to surrender personal devices, decades later. The message is very clear.
- thinkingemote 9mo ago
  You sent a report saying you were not searched for 20 times and now you are searched all the time? Has it been over 20 times that you have been searched?
  - K0balt 9mo ago
    lol. No, I’m definitely winning the search transaction! I got way more than I paid for!
- ralferoo 9mo ago
  > Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles. What were you hoping to achieve by sending that report? Most people would have just thought "wow, lucky I wasn't caught with that", taken it out of the bag so it didn't happen again and carried on with their lives. Deviating from that normal response makes it look like you're just trying to cause trouble.
  - ghaff 9mo ago
    Yeah, if I had a "Crap, what was that doing in there?" I'd be very quiet about it. As I wrote in a very different thread, I avoid putting anything in baggage that I might carryon that is even marginally prohibited. I used to do a lot more travel and it's inevitable that knives and the like would inevitable get left in a pocket.
542354234235 9mo ago
Interesting that none of these comments seem to be questioning why we can’t just carry a small pocketknife on the plane. We used to be able to before 9/11. The 9/11 hijackings only worked because the policy was comply, land, and let the negotiators do their work. Suicide attacks using commercial airlines just wasn’t a thing. We now have armored locking cockpit doors and no airplane would give up control to hijackers anymore. United Flight 93 was already taken over and heard about the World Trade Center and they revolted. Now, knives could only be used to commit a crime i.e. assaulting another passenger or crew. Banning liquids does more to prevent terrorists than banning knives. I can see banning them for the same reason concerts ban them, that it is a lot of people in a small space, but that is very different than “national security” or “preventing terrorism”.
- xxs 9mo ago
  it's still allowed across the EU (Mostly all of it)- up to 6cm blades are permitted in the cabin luggage.

defrost 9mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
noduerme 9mo ago
Honestly, I would just give them a pass to carry a ceremonial knife, if they could prove they were Sikhs and not someone pretending to be. But I guess that's why we can't have nice things and why the same rules have to apply to everyone. I think most reasonable people understand that they can't preserve every aspect of their personal beliefs or pride in a situation involving the safety of millions of people flying daily. Carrying a weapon is certainly a bit unusual as a pillar of faith, but there are plenty of others that could also be deemed antipathetic to the well functioning order of a modern society trying to move people safely from A to B. And the same way I would consider trained and licensed gun owners to be a relatively low threat and a rule-abiding group of citizens, that's how I would view Sikhs with their blades (or even more so). So if you're Amish, take a horse. If it's Shabbat, wait til Sunday. If you're the TSA and you want to be more efficient by discriminating, look at people who have no discrenable ideology, or those whose ideology actively conflicts with your mission of preventing attacks.
- defrost 9mo ago
  Sikh's carrying a knife, a bracelet, a comb, etc. has never bothered me in the slightest in all the decades I've known about this - the Khalistan movement in a particular location during a particular time aside, they're not exactly actual postcards for terrorism (despite what some might think when faced with people and turbans). They always had a pass here in Australia for many years until things tightened up. Not that I'm a fan, but in general Rules are Rules and making exceptions while fair in some senses will be unfair in others <shrug>. Circling back to my initial comment- it is the case that there is an actual reason rather than a made up bit of bullshit, to reasonably suspect that a Sikh might be carrying a knife ... if they are they're almost certain to also have a comb .. so that's handy.
  - noduerme 9mo ago
    okee yeah, and rules are rules, and there's a reason to think that. It would be nice if we lived in a world where rules could be bent in some cases for individuals if they actually posed no theeat, but we all have to deal with the lowest common denominator wanting to cause the most damage, so here we are. I must say, one thing that this reminds me of is what happens if you board an El Al flight. They don't racially profile you, they just ask you some fairly innocuous questions and watch your responses. I assume they have some way of monitoring your blood pressure, heart rate, and pupil dilation at a distance... but this hasn't really changed since the 1980s, when those things had to be read or guessed in realtime by a trained human. They have a phenomenally safe record, for a country under constant terror attacks. My takeaway from flying El Al is that there is a much better way to deal with security, that analyzes and addresses the potentially bad individual motives of anyone getting on a plane, and mostly lets everyone else pass. Which is to say that security in its best form should be almost transparent to people without malicious intentions. Having good intelligence coupled with treating each person as their own potential bomb threat is far superior to superficially treating everyone as a threat and having no real security, and far better than just creating security theater around certain people because they're of one race or ethnicity. But El Al's methods probably don't scale well to the size of US or European air travel, because you need highly trained people to stand there in the airport make those calls on the fly for every single passenger. If I were to guess - I'd guess El Al would let a Sikh bring a blade if they looked him in the eye for 10 seconds and decided he was okay.
- tsimionescu 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Shadasz 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - defrost 9mo ago
      Hangry, cramped, tired, entitled, redneck is easily #1 on the air rage list. Not exactly an ideology though.
      - noduerme 9mo ago
        Air rage != plan to become shahid
        defrost 9mo ago
        Your specific singular focus might blind you to all the other reasons planes have been hijacked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings and potential incidental dangers from unrest in confined spaces.
        noduerme 9mo ago
        @defrost: I apparently can't respond directly to you. It's a mistake to ascribe a singular focus to someone you don't know. There may be one out of ten thousand people in any group who might want to cause chaos or violence, and they may very well have their own reasons. It would be absurd, though, to not acknowledge that there are some "gospels", if you will take that term in the broadest sense possible, or sub-religions, which preach that violence is a path to salvation, and which tend to recruit people for the purpose of violence. There are also some political movements which fill the same vacuum for an aimless, angry human soul without religion. It is not that I have a singular focus on one religion nor one political movement, so much as that the evidence suggests that, currently, some movements have more violent offshoots and a more violent profile. There are a handful of political and religious ideologies in the world that lead to more suicide bombings and hijackings per year than, say, the total number done by believers in Zoroastrianism, Sikhs, Confucians, Hindus, Yazidis, Jews, Buddhists, Libertarians, Democratic Socialists, Freemasons and Christians combined. If you had, for instance, Jim Jones's cult or the Aum Shinrikyo boarding airplanes and blowing them up on a regular basis, and your response was that a person had to be a single-minded bigot to notice the fact that most airplane bombings originated with this particular ideology, then I'd say you were ignoring facts or willfully making excuses for ideologies which brainwashed people into doing those things. Possibly for reasons related to disliking your own society, which is perfectly fair, but certainly not neutral or scientific.

notamario 9mo ago

A Sikh is far more likely to be carrying a little sword than the average population.

noduerme 9mo ago
And far less likely to stab someone than the general population. It's not a great analogy, but the same applies to registered concealed carry gun owners. They're not the people who shoot people.

K0balt 9mo ago

Welcome to the club. I inadvertently traveled with not one, but two large box cutters in my carryon satchel for at least 20 flights before I discovered them while searching for some swag. I put them in there for a booth setup in Vegas years prior. Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles. Still screened and detained 100 percent of the time, sometimes for hours, sometimes having to surrender personal devices, decades later. The message is very clear.

thinkingemote 9mo ago
You sent a report saying you were not searched for 20 times and now you are searched all the time? Has it been over 20 times that you have been searched?
- K0balt 9mo ago
  lol. No, I’m definitely winning the search transaction! I got way more than I paid for!
ralferoo 9mo ago
> Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles. What were you hoping to achieve by sending that report? Most people would have just thought "wow, lucky I wasn't caught with that", taken it out of the bag so it didn't happen again and carried on with their lives. Deviating from that normal response makes it look like you're just trying to cause trouble.
- ghaff 9mo ago
  Yeah, if I had a "Crap, what was that doing in there?" I'd be very quiet about it. As I wrote in a very different thread, I avoid putting anything in baggage that I might carryon that is even marginally prohibited. I used to do a lot more travel and it's inevitable that knives and the like would inevitable get left in a pocket.

542354234235 9mo ago

Interesting that none of these comments seem to be questioning why we can’t just carry a small pocketknife on the plane. We used to be able to before 9/11. The 9/11 hijackings only worked because the policy was comply, land, and let the negotiators do their work. Suicide attacks using commercial airlines just wasn’t a thing. We now have armored locking cockpit doors and no airplane would give up control to hijackers anymore. United Flight 93 was already taken over and heard about the World Trade Center and they revolted. Now, knives could only be used to commit a crime i.e. assaulting another passenger or crew. Banning liquids does more to prevent terrorists than banning knives. I can see banning them for the same reason concerts ban them, that it is a lot of people in a small space, but that is very different than “national security” or “preventing terrorism”.

xxs 9mo ago
it's still allowed across the EU (Mostly all of it)- up to 6cm blades are permitted in the cabin luggage.