Doesn't polycarbonate BURN?

So, uhm, can't I just go down go into the kitchen and grab something to eat, go into the basement and find something highly flammable, come back upstairs, pour the flammable stuff all over the bed, light it, and then sit back and eat your food until you open the thing up instead of being roasted alive?

Did I miss something?

#43 JRTOM - From American heritage dictionary:

"Of or relating to a relationship between three elements such that if the relationship holds between the first and second elements and between the second and third elements, it necessarily holds between the first and third elements."

The relationship is trust, and the elements are roles. The elements are:

me as a passenger

pilot as a pilot

pilot as a shooter

Re: #28 RaisedByWolves

I certainly can't imagine that I'd choose to fight a guy with a gun over a guy without one. Would you?

Can you find me one - JUST ONE - experienced criminal who would prefer to attack an armed person over an unarmed person? You'd think that if armed people are so vulnerable to super-criminal-anti-gun-fu, they'd be chomping at the bit to take on people carrying guns.

Re: #28 Ken Hansen

You state:

"the pilot in question participated in training to learn the proper handling of a firearm in an airplane (and, one can only assume, other contexts). The fact that he was a pilot didn't qualify him to carry the hand gun, his successful completion of the training program did"

This presumes that the firearms training is sufficient. I posit that you are probably basing this on the hope that it's sufficient, rather than fact. You HOPE that the training qualified him.

I think that his firearms training is most likely a rounding error when compared to the training which qualified him to fly.

BTPEARCY - I never said they weren't trained.

In my blog I said that the firearms training they have is probably less then 5% of what they have in training to fly a jet.

If you are into gun-training then you know that they probably took 5 days of classes, if that. You also know that there probably was no stringent test at the end of the class, the class was merely pass/fail where fail would mean very bad behavior and pass meant that you could mostly hit the paper at 30 feet and the instructors didn't feel the urge to hide whenever you drew.

Compare that to how many hours are required before you are allowed to just fire up the engines in a jet, no less take off.

When pilots have enough training to make them provably as safe and competent with firearms as they are with planes, then I might trust them as much with guns as I trust them with planes...