My worry about this whole uproar is that if the bad guys are paying attention, one of them might decide to send Junior off to paradise, and turn Junior into a walking weapon. Gives me shivers just to think about, but I'm sure there's a nut job out there somewhere willing to give up a child in the name of the cause.
Yea. Except I'd rather face near zero percent risk of terrorist activity, verses near hundred percent risk of scope creep of civil liberty infringements. I've studied terrorism for quite a while, as I'm primarily a security geek. Yes, there are those types of folks out there. They're very rare, but they do exist and need to be shot. But selling our entire country down the river to tyranny is not the answer. It's a bad idea, and not cost effective anyways. If the nuts hit again in a large scale, odds are pretty low it'll relating to aviation, it'll probably be shooting up a mall or blowing up a sports stadium. That's the point of terrorism. The point of defeating terrorism is giving the finger to said terrorists, continuing on with life and killing those responsible. NOT, I say, NOT indulging in expensive oppression of your own people that only provides security by accident or side effect, if at all.
If you wanted to end aircraft hijacking, it'd be very simple. Retrofit all commercial passenger aircraft over a certain size to not be able to access the cockpit from the main aircraft and remote landing capacity in case of pilot incapacitation or whatnot. You could dork with the concept by training/arming the entire crew, adding an automatic cabin/cockpit commo cutoff, whatever. Expensive? Absolutely. It'd cost perhaps two or three weeks of our current security theater, and actually provide security. Not total, but that's infeasible anyways. The point of security is to make the critters go after other, easier targets.
De Selby is correct. If we spent a fraction of the security theater budget on free lightning rods, epi pens for bee strings and shooting sharks, all sources of rare fatalities, we'd save significantly more lives. Not saying we should do so, I'm just stating the cost efficiency.