There are two methods of taking down an airplane, the first is from the outside and the second is from the airplane itself. Although harming an airplane from the ground is much easier, the TSA spends almost all of its budget defending against in-flight terrorism (hijackers and bombers) with cockpit control as the biggest fear. The TSA has also begun cleansing all passengers of bottles with capacities of three ounces or more to reduce the amount of dangerous materials that might get onto a plane. If you were a terrorist, the obvious question might come to mind ‘what substance can incapacitate 130 people in less than 3 ounces?’ In asking yourself this question with access to the internet you might stumble upon something like Scopolamine.

Scopolamine is an extremely toxic drug that is synthesized from a tree that grows wildly in South America. What sets it apart from other Class-A narcotics is its ability to corrupt and incapacitate human decision making faculties, reducing adults to a dreamlike state where they are as coercible as toddlers. Depending on its potency, three ounces of Scopolamine could be enough to cripple multiple aircrafts. Nothing like this has happened and it never will. Our governments have entire intelligence gathering agencies that work around the clock to prevent these exact scenarios.

All of this effort, the billions of dollars spent on ending this very rare crime, the screening of our luggage, the scanning of our bodies, the pat-downs of children and the elderly, all stem from our endeavors to expunge passengers with one common and dangerous impulse, not the desire to harm others, but the desire to commit suicide. The hiring of incompetent people as our protectors does not make sense in defending against murderers, but it makes perfect sense in the light of suicide prevention psychology.

When nets are installed on suicide landmarks like the Empire State Building, not only do they prevent people from falling to their deaths, they prevent people from jumping at all. At Münster Terrace in Germany and Mount Mihara in Japan the addition of nets also reduced suicides at nearby jumping landmarks. Having nets installed in one location seems to hinder the suicidal tendency to jump in an area as a whole. Although the TSA is an inefficient deterrent of terrorism, they are extremely efficient at deterring the suicidal. They are installed safety nets; they don’t have to work to be effective, they just have to look like they will.

And they are, so why do we worry so much?

Imagine if tobacco killed 480 thousand Americans last year on a single day. Would a fear of tobacco be on the forefront of our minds? Is attacking the cause of these deaths less worthy of our concern? Do we only care about death prevention when the deaths are accompanied by a loud bang?

You have a 1 in 300 million chance of being bitten by a shark; you’re actually three thousand times more likely to be seriously injured by a toilet. Can knowing this eliminate a person’s fear of the ocean? Should it inspire laughter at the “swim at your own risk” signs on beaches? It should, but it doesn’t. We thrive on this fear-mongering, it gives us quick enemies to blame and something to fight. (This might explain people protecting themselves from murder rather than suicide which is often twice as likely, and the shifty eyes at foreigners in airports rather than at the airport’s power-outlets.)

There is no doubt that psychopathy is a real danger, but there will always be psychopaths and they occur as naturally as hurricanes. We are hurting ourselves by spending our cultural energy being distracted by fireworks and demonizing these extremely rare circumstances rather than fighting the actual dangers in our future.