I'm not going to argue with Jack Burton regarding whether or not guns would have made a difference. As he points out in his OP, the mindset was wrong for someone to immediately react with or without firearms.
I suggest the key that we need to change is our own mindset. He suggests that before 9/11, the odds were in your favor if you simply kept quiet. Chances were, you would walk away whole, if a bit hungry and humiliated.
This strikes me as surprisingly similar to the basic argument that if a thug jumps you on the street, give him what he asks for, and chances are he will leave you alone.
Hungry, humiliated, tired, or beaten? Nothing serious has been lost, right? I disagree. If I submit to their demands, whether the thug, hijacker, or terrorist, I have given up my freedom, and my liberty. I trade my own rights for my "supposed safety."
In my opinion, these rights make up the very foundation of our nation, and I truly value them more than life itself. If we have learned anything from 9/11, it is that we can cannot reason against evil. Yet decades before, Patton said, "Great danger lies in the notion that we can reason with evil." What will it take for us to learn this lesson?
Imagine, in a hypothetical world, if everytime someone tried to rob someone else, their response was "No, f*** you!" followed by a violent retaliation? I would say Col. Cooper was right. A ferocious counter-attack, and the total absence of any attempt to reason with evil. Soon enough, evil people would begin to get the message, that we will not stand for their malicious doings.
The same principle applies on the larger scale when facing terrorism. Hopefully we have learned, through 9/11, that we must never sit back, and "hope for the best." If we truly value our liberty and freedom as our forefathers did, we should be willing to lay down our lives for our principles. Every time, all the time.
Good thoughts but for several items...
1) Being mugged does not risk the life of 200 other people. The actions I take to defend myself are not necessarily the same actions I would take when other people's lives are also on the line.
2) There is a major difference between taking an action with a mugger where you have a opportunity to survive and win. The actual scenario on the plane was set up by the hijackers so that the passengers thought that any action would lead to the utter destruction of the plane. They also knew that they were most likely going to come out safely at the end.
3) What was so overwhelmingly necessary other than you don't like being "Hungry, humiliated, tired, or beaten?" that would cause you to sacrifice those 200 innocent lives? Is your pride that important to you?
4) If you shoot a hijacker at noon at 35,000 feet everyone in the plane dies when the bomb goes off. If you shoot the very same hijacker at 3:00 PM when the plane is on the ground, a few people die from the bomb going off. What is so important that you can't wait those three, or four, or five hours for the plane to get onto the ground?
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