Yesterday noon I attended Mass at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart in Makati City. It is also the parish of Vice President Jejomar Binay and his family. Due to the feast of the Pentecost, Binay was there with his son the Mayor Jun Jun Binay, Congresswomen Abigail Binay and Monique Lagdameo, the Vice Mayor and all the councilors and officials of Makati City.
I always carry my pistol wherever I go. So I simply walked in with my small bag with my loaded Ruger LCP and 4 spare magazines, and sat down a few feet away from the Vice President and his dignitaries. In spite of the presence of military and police escorts and an army of plain clothes fierce looking body guards, there I was sitting for an hour and a half with a loaded gun (in an obvious black gun bag) a few feet away from the Vice President. No one bothered to check me.
Thus experiencing this, it makes me wonder how easily terrorists could sneak in weapons and create havoc. Frankly, this type of lax security and incompetence scares me to death. If I can do it, then apparently anyone else could do it. It also helps me understand how worthless all these bodyguards, dogs, and metal detectors are, and how criminals manage to bring in guns in spite of all these security measures.
Your example highlights several things which most people overlook.
First of all, most of what passes for security is actually ‘security theater‘, which is defined as, “countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security.” Anyone who travels by air or enters a shopping mall gets a good dose of this.
Second, it shows that many security threats–especially terrorism-related–are overblown. Terrorists are the boogeymen that governments use to whip their citizens into line. If they truly posed the danger we are lead to believe, planes and buildings would be exploding every day. The fact is that most people value their lives too much to do something stupid like carry out a suicide mission.
No doubt genuine threats exist but they are not be stopped by charade. They are thwarted by the brave operatives we never hear about who infiltrate terror cells, or behind-the-scenes information gathering by intelligence services.
If anything, my experience proved once again that no one is totally safe from attack. Whe discussing a possible assassination hit on an enemy, Al Pacino said in Godfather 2: “If history has shown us anything, it is that anyone can be hit.” How true.