Air travelers will no longer be asked, “Has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry an item on this flight?” and “Have any of the items you are traveling with been out of your immediate control since the time you packed them?” despite the one in 500 quintillion chance that they might trip up a terrorist plot. Instead of getting rid of the questions altogether, maybe they should just try being smarter about them. Like, as the ticket agent weighs the luggage, he could just casually ask, “So, what kind of detonator did you put on your bomb?”

“It’s an altitude sensitive… I mean… I don’t what you’re talking about!”

“Aha! Security, take him away and beat him!”

One of the first things I learned when I started using firearms was that Dirty Harry, unless he put in ear protection before each gun fight, would have been deaf by the end of the first sequel. Guns are loud; even a .22 handgun fired out doors will pop you ears. Up north of me in Cocoa, Florida, they used space age technology to make a shooting range quieter, but why go to such extremes? We already have something that makes gun’s quieter: silencers.

Silencers have such a bad connotation into today’s society, so much so that even more states ban them than ban fully automatics. When someone hears silencer, they think “evil assassin” (or, I guess by today’s lingo, “evil regime-changer”), but it’s just a logical thing to make guns quieter. Is there really a compelling reason that my neighbors have to get woken up every single I time I shoot an intruder? And no one gets angry at car manufacturers for making engines quieter even though I could easily stealthily kill someone with my Hyundai. Plus, if the idea is to keep people from using silencers for evil, then isn’t it a good idea not to make those people angry by forcing them to pay a $200 Class III weapons transfer fee? It’s just common sense.