... One that should be the best, but isn't; the ACLU and the right to die in a train wreck.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: American Civil Liberties Union

. . . One That Should Be The Best, But Isn't

Does the Average Guy worry when he steps through an airport metal detector? Sure he does. He worries about business. He worries about the rising cost of season tickets. He worries about makinghis flight. He worries about his Walkman as it passes through the x-ray machine. And when the overhead buzzer goes off because he forgot to divest himself of his keys, and the young female attendent asks if he would please empty his pockets and pass through again, he worries if she thinks he's good looking.

What he probably does not worry about is whether the metal detector search violates his civil liberties. And that is what petrifies the American Civil Liberties Union. The group states its fear in ACLU policy #270: "Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of the airport search question is the readiness with which most people, civil libertarians included, have accepted and indeed welcomed such procedures. It reflects a disturbing tendency to accept any measures, such as routine searches in public places, which are supposedly devised to protect our safety. Such an atmosphere of acquiescence poses the gravest threat to all our civil liberties."

Supposedly devised? The gravest threat to all our civil liberties? The passion that the ACLU has historically marshalled to combat censorship and racial bigotry is now leading it to fight even the most benign safety measures. As we grope for what to do about hazards such as drunk driving and kids routinely toting pistols down school corridors, and as we seek to stem drug and alcohol abuse the the people who operate our trains and aircraft, the ACLU puts up its dukes as if it were mixing it up with Bull Connor.

When talking about public safety, ACLU officials can sound like nothing so much as Chicago School eocnomists drearily insisting that padded dashboards and pollution controls might save lives but can't be tolerated because they threaten free enterprise. Similarly, the ACLU can't see metal detectors as the modest act of a democratic government to thwart hijackings and murders. It insists on seeing each measure "supposedly" meants to protect health and safety as another dangerous step towards fascism.

What is dangerous is the ACLU's reading of the Cosntitution, specifically its interpretation of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable" searches and seizures. The ACLU has dismissed randmom searches, like those at the airport, as unconstitutional. But not all random searches are created equal. Surely, we have the common sense to recognize the difference between random searches with the rational aim of protecting public safety and searches with the irrational aim of persecuting minorities or minority opinion. There is also an important distinction between searches that employ outrageous techniques, like strip searches, and those that are "minimally intrusive," such as passing through a metal detector. And, finally, there's an important common sense distinction between searches so humiliating or terrifying that the innocent dread them and those that only the guilty fear. There are some fronts on which the ACLU wages noble constitutional struggles. The gate to the Eastern shuttle is not one of them.

This extremist reading of the Bill of Rights might be easy to dismiss if it were that of some small libertarian lobby with a walk-up office. But with 250,000 members, a budget of more than $15 million, and an important presence in Washington, the ACLU is one of the nation's most powerful lobbies. A crack staff of 70 attorneys, pro bono arrangements with the nation's top firms, a caseload that lets it brag of being "the largest private law firm in the country"--all this makes the ACLU a potent litigator. Only the Justice Department argues more cases before the Supreme Court.

But the Union's strength lies in more than numbers. The ACLU has a unique 68-year tradition in American political culture. This is the group that backed Clarence Darrow in the Scopes Monkey Trial, got James Joyce's Ulysses into American libraries, fought for the right of workers to strike and against laws that made interracial marriage a crime. So it's particularly sad, not to mention alarming, that on important issues of health and safety the ACLU is dead wrong.

Remember why those metal detectors were installed: the little matter of hijackings, or "skyjackings" as they were called in the late 1960s when the practice was discovered by mad gunmen and those interested in one-way flights to Havana. Because airport metal detector searches have worked and because, like Muzak, they've become a minor annoyance to which we don't pay much attention, we've almost forgotten the terror that brought them into being. In the 37 years before 1968, there were only seven hijackings. Over the next five years, hijackings (successful and attempted) averaged 27 a year.

James Bond

In 1973, the airlines began screening all passengers in major U.S. airports with metal detectors. Since then, the average number of annual hijackings and attempts has dropped to 7.4, a decrease that is even more dramatic when you consider that a high proportion of the hijacking attempts were in situations where metal detectors did not come into play. For instance, in the first six months of 1987, there were four attempted hijackings in the U.S., none of them successful. In one, a terrorist pulled a gun and grabbed a hostage at the ticket counter before he ever approached the metal detectors. Another involved a small plane in the Virgin Islands in which passengers were not required to be screened. The other two hijackers claimed to be armed but turned out to be bluffing. All totaled, airport security has nabbed 38,000 weapons, making 17,000 arrests and foiled, by the Federal Avaition Administration's count, some 117 potential hijackings since 1973. And who knows how many terrrorists or self-proclaimed Messiahs were deterred from trying in the first place? It doesn't take a forensics expert to realize that metal detectors work. (It should be noted that they would work even better if they were used on checked as well as carry-on luggage.)

Effectiveness isn't everything, of course. A knock on the door by police in the middle of the night would be an "effective" way to seize contraband. It would also...