Exactly. When they started confiscating knives I made that point- I'd feel much safer if they handed out free steak knives to passengers as they board the plane, like they used to do in gas stations.

There are so many fallacies here it's hard to narrow it down, but a basic one is that, since good people still vastly outnumber bad, one clear way to promote evil is to make sure that good people are helpless to stop it. We seem to be doing our best.

The TSA is committed to this increasingly-insane path, and they CANNOT abandon it, because it's a microcosm of the government's approach to society as a whole. They cannot ever admit that it won't work, no matter how glaringly obvious it becomes, because it then also becomes obvious that all the other government policies that criminalize people's efforts to defend themselves don't work either, and never have.

If... I hate to say it, but "when"... all this nonsense of confiscating nail clippers and penknives fails to stop another major attack, they will redouble their useless efforts, and move them into more and more areas of our lives. Look for any disagreement with, and then any questioning of the policies, to be labeled first "aiding terrorism", and then just "terrorist". If it goes on long enough, "enforcement" will be increasingly focused not on those seeking to victimize innocents, but on those who question their authority.

I don't know how this is going to fall out in the end, but when the enforcement agencies are increasingly, irrevokably committed to something that cannot work, people are going to get hurt.