The Case for Profiling

In the wake of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, we see the bankruptcy of our airline security system in this country. In this RCP story we learn that our system focused on the wrong thing:

As Bob Poole, director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation, recently wrote, this failure reflects the flawed thinking of aviation security policy, namely a fixation "on keeping bad things -- as opposed to bad people -- off of airplanes."

It is an unavoidable fact that these "bad people" tend to come from certain places and subscribe to a certain religious affiliation. Focus on them.

And in the case of the bomber, this was certainly true: young Muslim man, recently in Yemen, paid cash for a one-way ticket, no luggage checked in for his international flight. These should have immediately indicated that the bomber be screened further.

Some people would call this "racial profiling", and object on moral grounds. I would call it common sense. The people attacking us are not Lutherans, but Muslims, and we need to face up to the fact that while not all Muslims are terrorists, every terrorist that we have captured or encountered in the last 20 years has been a Muslim.

Political correctness on this issue is going to kill a lot of Americans.