America’s rail-road has 99 problems and a firearms policy wasn’t one. Nevertheless, our nation’s illustrious Senate, which is to Amtrak a piggybank, has made its next payment contingent on on a change in firearms policy. Because why not wage a proxy battle over gun rights inside a dysfunctional, neglected piece of our national transportation infrastructure?

It should have been pretty easy to cast this crude legislative interference in a negative light, but only a handful of Democratic senators could be bothered to vote against it. And now, a chorus of whining has erupted from the usual liberal editorial suspects, all too eager to lose another battle over gun control. But it’s a little shocking just how badly the offended New York Times editorial board writes up their rebuke:

In a shocking genuflection to the gun lobby, the Senate has voted to deny Amtrak its indispensable $1.6 billion federal subsidy unless it allows passengers to transport handguns in their checked luggage. The budget support would be stripped in six months unless Amtrak scraps the gun ban that it wisely adopted five years ago after the terrorist railroad atrocities in Madrid.

It’s shocking! That a Mississippi senator will use $1.6 billion of leverage to reverse a railroad’s irrelevant gun ban. Shocking.

In reality the gun ban was anything but a wise response to those particular terrorist attacks; it was a crude, we’re-doing-something response. The 2004 Madrid train bombings did not involve any firearms. They didn’t even involve regional trains. Bombs were stashed in backpacks, and easily left on commuter trains. This kind of attack was neither unanticipated nor unprecedented; we didn’t learn anything from it to inform policymaking unless it was in terms of emergency response or train durability. Until the government has a way to detect and deactivate bombs with lasers from outer space, it will probably happen again. It’s certainly not deterred by an impossible-to-enforce firearms ban on the world’s most pathetic railroad.

Still, our Times editors have endless dumb things to say on this subject:

Proponents said the change was needed to put Amtrak back to its pre-9/11 gun policy and equate it with airline security measures that allow unloaded, locked handguns in checked baggage. This is lunatic reasoning for a nation supposedly sensitized by the 9/11 attacks. Why should gun owners be treated as privileged travelers?

The only lunatic reasoning here is the assertion that being sensitized—terrorized—by 9/11 should help define a train company’s firearms policy. The Times’s fear mongering is Rovian in its gall, but Dukakisian in its awkwardness.

Amtrak has none of the hermetic procedures where airport passengers are screened shoeless at detectors while their checked baggage is separately secured. Trains stop at stations and passengers come and go. Amtrak presently has a system of checking passengers and screening baggage at random, much the way New York police monitor mass transit.

So. There is someone over the age of twelve that buys into the fairy tale of “hermetic” security zones at airports. But the truly disturbing thing is that we have a supposedly liberal editorial board in New York hankering for general passenger searches at Penn Station. And the truly dumb thing is their inability to see that the absence of thorough searching undermines the notion that Amtrak’s current rules stop terrorists, or any rebellious type (tweens?), from carrying weapons on a train.

The terrorized Times must not care that, by the numbers, their fears are completely unfounded. Riding regional rail is vastly safer than highway driving. Simply shifting trips from cars to trains does, in all certainty, save lives. Discouraging rail trips, by imitating the onerous security procedures of airlines, would only result in more bodies being shredded by metal, glass, and asphalt at 60 miles per hour. It’s the same slightly counterintuitive (but not that complicated really!) butterfly effect that makes bicycle helmets such a poor, and even negative, safety investment.

And it’s no coincidence that successful train bombings of the past decade struck subways in London and commuter rail in Madrid rather than regional rail. Those trains are the easiest to board and exit without being noticed among the millions who ride them each day. This will always be the case. On top of that, busted old Amtrak is a particularly poor symbol of American power. Terrorists may as well attack a homeless shelter. As long as the door is wide open to murderous mayhem on subways and commuter rail—and let’s face it, it is—our government and Amtrak are needlessly wasting resources and encroaching on civil liberties by burdening America’s few regional rail passengers with unwarranted search. We put up with enough crap as it is.

After their Madrid hit the bombers did in fact go after a regional rail line, one of the fancy high-speed ones that you have to be Japanese or French or Spanish to invest in. But their bomb didn’t go off, and the police figured out where the bombers were hiding and caught them and now the world is safe from train bombings until the next group of assholes decides to kill a bunch of people and ruin their own lives in the name of some radical politics or religion. It’s the world we live in guys! But it doesn’t change the fact that all trains are vastly safer than cars.

I am not one of the Times’ privileged, despised gun owners. I have no reason to travel with weapons and the typical, actual Amtrak rider doesn’t either. But. The same Senate that is forcing Amtrak to accept guns on board also makes the train company run wildly unpopular, deeply unprofitable routes through the kinds of places where people do like guns. They are just being consistent, you see!

It does make sense for Amtrak to allow registered firearms in baggage on lines that their typical passenger will never use. And who knows, maybe one person somewhere in the country will take a hunting trip that involves a train, once. It could happen, and anyway, it just isn’t productive for Amtrak to involve itself in the country’s terrible gun politics. It’s their job to run trains through regions with widely varying attitudes and laws about gun ownership. Going back to their old policy will not result in northeast corridor trains being jammed with guns any more than they were in 2000, or even currently.

But our national train company will probably try for the worst of all worlds, as is its wont. They are already crying about what it will cost to re-implement the old policy, because obviously planes being used as missiles and bombs being placed in train baggage means you can not just have rednecks’ guns locked up within the passenger cabin like before. Disjointedly, Amtrak is also sad that they don’t get to search everyone’s bags like the airlines do, and the Times editorial board is sad too. So they will probably use this silly senatorial occasion to indulge in additional unnecessary, federally sponsored unwarranted searches that they (and New York’s MTA) have randomly instituted in the past decade.

Who cares that trains are safe when you can exchange freedom from unreasonable search for a blissful feeling of security?