In my opinion, those who ridicule the "nineteen men with boxcutters" scenario are guilty of applying today's mindset to events that happened under a totally different set of rules. Yes, it's absurd to think that nineteen men with boxcutters could hijack four airliners and use them as flying bombs today, but it was far from absurd on September 11, 2001.

On that date, the accepted way to respond in a hijack situation was to go along with the hijacker(s). In all previous hijackings, the perpetrators' goals had simply been to make the plane go someplace other than it's original destination. Acceding to their demands was the safest thing to do. A hijacking was most likely going to be an inconvenience, not a deadly event, and actions which might turn one into a deadly event were simply not taken. Fighting back against a highjacker was considered foolhardy in the extreme. Those "type A businessmen" probably did not suspect for an instant that the outcome of what was going on in those planes would be anything more than an unscheduled detour to someplace like Tehran. The idea that people would actually take control of a plane and use it as a flying bomb was as foreign to the psyches of the people on board as the idea of an alien spaceship using a tractor beam to tow it to the moon.

Saying that the idea of a planeload of people not fighting back is absurd is like saying that a child being bitten by a poisonous snake because he didn't know how dangerous it was is absurd. People's reactions to threatening situations are in line with the perceived threat level, and the difference between the perceived threat level during a highjacking, should one occur today, and the ones that occurreed on 09/11/01 is astronomical. A hijacker with a boxcutter today would get the shit beat out of him by thirty people, even if it meant one or two people got their throats slit in the process. Better a couple of dead people than a planeload. That's simply not the way people thought before 9/11.

And those who think a boxcutter is not a deadly weapon are guilty of playing semantic games. The word "boxcutter" sounds harmless, and the exposed blade of a boxcutter may only be an inch long, but that blade is razor sharp and can cut through a person's trachea as easily as a surgeon's scalpel. If you don't think they're dangerous, call up your local hospital emergency room and ask how many store clerks' arms and legs they've stitched up this week due to accidental, self-inflicted boxcutter wounds. If people's jugular veins and trachea were in their forearms instead of their necks, stocking shelves would be the world's most dangerous job. If you'd like to see the six-inch scar in my own left forearm from when I was a nineteen-year-old grocery clerk, come visit.