Firecrest Wrote:You trying to tell me that car alarms don't deter thieves? That given the choice between two cars, a thief is equally as likely to break into one that has a security system as one without? Not sure I'm buying.
Actually, I have a lot of experience on this. My brother was a nasty little thief when we were teenagers and stole more car stereos to sell to get drugs than some people have had warm meals. While he was in prison (never got caught for the stereos, got busted actually stealing a car and leaving his pager in the car because he's stupid and was on a lot of drugs). The reality is that someone with a car stereo is more often than not EASIER to steal from. Why? Because you can test them out. If you roll by, throw a rock at the car, see if anyone comes to investigate the sound. If not, you know they're not watching and its an open target. And as it turns out, almost EVERYONE thinks their alarm going off is not a real problem and ignores it.
If someone parks in the same spot regularly, and the thief know it is a big score, they just regularly tamper the alarm to the point where it is going off all the time. The victim will either disable it, or quit responding to it, and in turn giving the thief a free score.
My point isn't to discredit your TSA position, but that they're bad comparisons. Or they're not, depending on how you look at it. A good criminal knows how to deconstruct a security system. More security sometimes makes things easier if it makes the people in charge of that security more lazy, or makes them focus on certain things while ignoring others.