> If you punch a person in a supermarket, you are not banned from supermarkets.
If you punch a person in a supermarket, authorities can be summoned to take you away. If you do that on a plane, that can't be done. Planes are safe because things are heavily regulated and expected to go according to an extremely strict plan. Any aberration increases the risk of a catastrophic event.
Your comparison does not work. You can be taken away from a supermarket in that instance. You can legally come back to the same supermarket in the future. And even if the owner decides you are not welcome in his store, you can go to any other store.
Banning a person from ever flying again is not the same thing at all.
I’m not taking a position here, but you didn’t counter their argument. They also explicitly stated that it’s not the same thing, but that it’s reasonable it gets treated differently because of the security ramifications. You didn’t engage with that line of thinking, you just reiterated that the context is different, which you both already seem to agree on.
"You can legally come back to the same supermarket in the future." Incorrect, you can be trespassed and thus legally prevented from coming back to the same supermarket in the future.
> which technically, means you can never drive yourself again.
I haven't audited all 50 states, but at least in all the states I've lived in, there is no way to permanently lose your license from any number of DUIs. The license suspensions (and jail time) go up for each DUI someone gets, but they're always able to get their license back at some point.
Here in NL, a driver's license can be forfeited by judicial order. Usually in such cases, the driver has to re-take the driving test and can regain their driver's license that way, but it takes time and is quite costly around here.
Which is why it might make sense to get the government involved, instead of having a purely private-sector no-fly-list sharing among airlines, which would effectively ground someone without supervision or recourse.
(Though I can imagine some libertarians reply "well, just take your own plane..." :-)
AFAIK the pilots decides who are eligible to get on a flight or not. So I guess they can say that they don’t want to have people with a prior history on their plane. The pilots are responsible for the flights safety.
If you punch a person in a supermarket, authorities can be summoned to take you away. If you do that on a plane, that can't be done. Planes are safe because things are heavily regulated and expected to go according to an extremely strict plan. Any aberration increases the risk of a catastrophic event.