[burrows]

> In more of a real-life scenario, millions of people have spent the last 20 years wasting way more than 15 minutes standing in line to take off their shoes and get x-rayed every time they fly in an airplane to protect against a "potential national security threat" when the only thing that actually needed to happen was locking the cabin doors while the plane is in flight.

Where the unstated goal is to prevent hijackers from turning airplanes into aimable missiles? Yeah, I like your argument, what are the counterpoints?

[InitialLastName]

Option 1: After 9/11 the airlines were desperate to get people to fly again, needed some theater to comfort people (because evidently "still orders of magnitude safer than cars per vehicle miles traveled" wasn't convincing), and this let them offload what security they needed to do onto the federal government.