This kind of thing is actually a big deal in computer science. I remember my teachers telling people who’s programs took too long to start" If a billion people use this, you could save X lives by shortening your load time"
Don’t insult other members here, it’s against the rules.
So…if your sister is getting married, all the Grans, Aunties, Moms and cousins go to the market to buy wedding goods and…BOOM! Bomb kills all of them. And then you learn Police had a hours warning, but did nothing. Because wasting time evacuating the market is just not worth the lives that would have been saved. Nobody likes having their time wasted, after all.
You gonna be okay with that? Does that cost saving still seem worth the lives of half your family?
Why not refuse to send out fire trucks, until we can smell the smoke?
There’s an ep of Airport Miami (or whatever its called) and the teaser for one of the episodes involves someone calling in a bomb threat and saying “There are 200 pounds of C4 distributed throughout the airport”…I haven’t seen the episode and I’m sure they evacuated the airport, but…REALLY? 200 POUNDS of C4 throughout the airport? How the hell would someone sneak 200 pounds of C4 into an airport and distribute it throughout?
It was a plot device for another type of threat, in a novel, but I don’t think it would be that hard , if the C4 was packed into those hand sanitizer dispensers.
Declan
Okay, I’m going to answer this seriously.
If the motive of a person who calls in a bomb threat is to disrupt some location then, yes, responding to the threat and evacuating the building is giving him what he wants. And, as you point out, by giving him what he wants due to just a bomb threat, it eliminates the need for the person to plant an actual bomb.
Now suppose, as a hypothetical, we stop responding to bomb threats. What will this person do now? Will he just abandon his anti-social behavior? No, probably not.
But now that we’ve eliminated the possibility for him to disrupt some location via a empty threat, he’ll have to commit an actual act. If he wants to get any effect now, he’ll have to set off an actual bomb or start a fire or release tear gas inside the building. Obviously, this a much worse situation then what we have now.
As long as people are going to be anti-social, society is better off channeling their behavior towards harmless threats rather than harmful acts.
Honestly, I wouldn’t think it would be that difficult. An airport is one of the places where people carrying around luggage is normal.
“Now, give us fifty million or we’ll detonate…wait. BOB, did you attach detonators to the C4? Goddamnit. I’ll call you back.”
Has anyone ever actually backed up a bomb threat?
If not, the OP sounds a lot smarter than all the experts here.
Oh, good. Economists aren’t the only ones that think aggregates and averages are real.
Both are wrong. Honestly, I don’t like to throw ugly words around lightly, by that is some of the most stupid reasoning I have ever heard.
Yes.
Back in the 80s, the IRA bombings in England would sometimes come with a coded warning, so the police would know it wasn’t just some random jerk calling in a bluff. However, the IRA sometimes used these codes just to bluff, so it worked both ways.
Maybe you should go back and reread the OP.
He said later in the thread:
“The actual live bombings where a threat was made in advance, in the United States, in the last decade? Zero.”
If that is so, doesn’t it seem rather odd that we flip our shit like kids in a candy store over an essentially negligible threat?
“Kids in a candy store?” Kids like candy stores. No one likes to receive a bomb threat. Weird metaphor.
And…how is evacuating the site “flipping our shit?”
Finally, how would banning the evacuation of the site make any sense at all?
I think bomb threats should still lead to evacuations, but the bomb-hoaxers should be required to pay absolutely immense fines and financial compensation, and other penalties as well. Perhaps 100 hours of community service for every person that was evacuated.
If a bomb-threat-hoax causes 1,000 people to be evacuated, and the person making the bomb threat is required to perform 100,000 hours of community service as a penalty, that would sure be a deterrent.
Sorry, I didn’t see this before…but making insinuations like this should be avoided too.
Also ‘cruel and unusual punishment’.
Kids become screaming, irrational loons, much as grown adults do when a bomb threat is made.
Because it disrupts the activity of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
Because, as evidenced by a complete lack of actual follow-through, bomb threats are made with the explicit purpose of disrupting peoples’ lives to watch them “flip their shit.” Stop reacting to the child who cries wolf, and the child will stop crying wolf.
Cite, please? When public buildings are evacuated, the process is usually orderly, without screaming. I think you’re as wrong here as in all your other reasoning.
You didn’t answer the question: how is evacuating a building “flipping our shit?”
This might be a decent reason for people to choose not to evacuate in the case of a threat, although that’s dangerous reasoning. That lump in your breast might be benign…but that isn’t the way intelligent people gamble.
But you haven’t addressed why people should be prevented by law from evacuating a building when a threat has been received. No one has; the idea is inane. If a threat were received, and no action were taken…and the bomb was real…the harm done is vastly more than the harm done from a dry-run evacuation.
At very best, you might have a case for allowing people to choose, for themselves, whether or not to leave the area. You have zero case for citing people with civil or criminal penalties if they choose to leave the area.
Or, as I noted before, if people stop reacting to bomb threats, criminals might use actual bombs to achieve the disruption they want.
Do you feel replacing bomb threats with bombs would be an improvement?