Because yesterday’s horrific Ariana Grande concert bombing took place at a sports arena, and because I’ve written about sports arena security, I feel like I should have something to say about it, beyond the obvious fact that it’s horrific. With the sketchy details available so far, here’s what I can think of:

• The explosion went off in the arena lobby, so the obvious question is how the bomber got the explosives in past security. (Assuming the lobby was inside the arena gates, which isn’t entirely clear from this diagram.) The bomb is described as an “improvised explosive device,” which could be made entirely (or almost entirely) from plastic explosives, and thus be difficult to scan for with metal detectors.
• The mother of a 19-year-old who was at the concert (and uninjured) said that “although her son had water taken off him, his bags were not searched and security did not check what he was carrying,” something that was echoed by other attendees. That’s dumb security, obviously, but exactly the kind of “security theater” that stadiums and arenas engage in when faced with the dilemma of how to get tens of thousands of fans to their seats while also doing some minimal security search, which means minimal is exactly what you get.
• This is almost certainly going to lead to increased security measures like more stringent bag checks and more walkthrough metal detectors, neither of which I’m all that confident will do much to prevent future bombings, especially since not only can IEDs be strapped to someone’s body rather than carried in a bag, but a bomber could have done about the same amount of damage standing just outside the arena lobby instead of just inside it.
• The most effective way to prevent attacks on innocent concertgoers is to get fewer people in the world thinking that that’s an effective way to get their point across. That’s hard.

And that’s all I’ve got. I’d love to be able to blame this on someone (other than the bomber), or suggest an easy fix, but I’m not too hopeful on either count. In the meantime, my sympathies to the families of those killed and injured. What a damn world.

In response to Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris (but not in response to Thursday’s terrorist attacks in Beirut, because those weren’t outside a stadium and besides, those people’s lives don’t matter as much), the NFL ramped up security for yesterday’s games. How did they respond to the news that suicide vests, which have been around since the 1940s, are a thing? With bomb-sniffing dogs, increased bag checks, and:

In St. Louis, event staff at the Edward Jones Dome wore red shirts and jackets with the word “SECURITY” in large yellow letters. Previously, their shirts had been a less visible shade of yellow with black lettering.

I don’t want to belittle the desire to show fans that they’re doing something, anything, to enhance stadium safety, really I don’t. But given that the suicide bomber who tried to enter the Stade de France was caught not by dogs or walkthrough detectors but by a simple low-tech patdown — from what I can tell from online research, most explosive vests won’t be caught by metal detectors — that terror groups have shown the ability to learn from the past and choose new targets and techniques to pick the easiest target, and perhaps most important, the bomber still managed to kill people outside the stadium, it definitely feels like this is somewhere between security theater for show and fighting the last war. If the NFL succeeds in ensuring that any future terror attacks take place not inside stadiums but in stadium parking lots or public parks or rock clubs, is that a victory?

Anyway, no one was killed at any NFL stadium yesterday, so hooray for giraffe repellent!

This is a bit awry of this site’s usual topic, but since I wrote it and some of you may be interested: The New York Yankees instituted a new biometric fingerprint-scanning method for fans to bypass the metal detectors that have made for huge lines at games, and it is as stupid as stupid can be:

Unlike airports, ballparks don’t usually have an ID-checking stage to skip. Security may want to know that you have tickets and that you’re not trying to smuggle in Uranium-235 under your cap, but they don’t give a crap about who you are. So the only way to expedite entry for the biometrically approved is to let them skip the metal detectors, provided they are bag-free—even though all they’ve shown is who they are, not what they’re carrying.

In other words, if you need someone to carry some brass knuckles into Yankee Stadium for your next bleacher brawl, I’m your man. Unless you want to take 60 seconds to join CLEAR Fast Access yourself, and stuff them in your own pockets.

There are differing reports on exactly what the experience has been for Yankees fans (and Giants and Rockies fans before them) who use CLEAR Fast Access to skip the lines: One person on social media claimed he was wanded, which did not happen at the gate I witnessed; another said she didn’t even have to submit to a bag check, which goes against what CLEAR officials told me. But either way, several MLB teams have now gone through the trouble of installing metal detectors at all gates (because the league now requires it, though wands are still an alternate option, and are widely used by the Mets, among other teams, to speed entry), discovered that it creates huge lines, then allowed fans to skip this step entirely just by proving they have a driver’s license and fingerprints.

If the detectors made little sense in the first place other than as security theater, this new wrinkle makes even less sense. But you know what they always say: Two wrongs make a right! Er, that’s how the phrase goes, right?

Lots of coverage today of the crazy-long lines at baseball stadiums on opening day, where fans ran into MLB’s new rules requiring metal detectors at all entrances. Here’s the massive lines at the New York Yankees game, and here’s fans griping about it at ballparks all over. And here’s my photo of the lines outside the Mets‘ home stadium:

That doesn’t look so bad, until you consider that the Mets weren’t actually playing at home yesterday — this was just the thousand or so people who turned up to watch the broadcast of the game for free on the center field video screen. Admittedly, for actual games there will be a few more entrances (and detectors) open, but I’m still not looking forward to the first time 40,000 people all arrive at the same time for a big game, say against the Yankees.

Meanwhile, what none of the coverage has touched on is that, as I reported for Vice last fall, security experts largely think that metal detectors are useless “security theater” measures that make sports leagues look like they’re doing something but don’t do squat to make anyone safer:

[Alabama economist Walter] Enders says that the main effect of tighter security at stadium entrances will likely be to drive any hypothetical attackers—and let’s remember that no actual terrorists have actually attacked sports venues in America outside of that time Bruce Dern tried it—to set off bombs outside stadiums instead, which would not be a happy outcome: “You’re trying to get in the door, there’s 20,000 people standing around outside. I could do a lot of damage there, just as easily as I could if I brought the thing inside. Maybe even more.” (His students, Enders notes, are constantly wondering aloud why no one ever simply flies an airplane over a stadium and drops an explosive device out the window.)

Besides, if we really cared about safety, Enders says, we’d do things like ensure that bag checks actually check bags, beyond a quick look to ensure that no one is smuggling in unauthorized foodstuffs. “I just went to see Alabama-West Virginia in Atlanta,” he notes. “My wife and I wanted to bring something in to drink. I said, ‘Put it in the bottom of the purse, and we’ll put the binoculars and the program on top, and that’s the end of that.'”

The problem with real bag checks, of course, is that they’re even more time-consuming and labor-intensive. Walk-through metal detectors offer the perfect blend of comforting concern and barely workable efficiency that have made them the go-to security devices at airports everywhere — even if there’s no evidence that they actually keep anyone safer.