Leadership Quote by Dave Reichert

Reichert’s line is engineered to make disagreement feel like negligence. By opening with “It does not make sense,” he frames the issue as pure common sense, not a political choice with tradeoffs. That move pre-sorts the audience: if you’re on the other side, you’re not just wrong, you’re irrational. It’s a familiar post-9/11 rhetorical tactic, but still effective because it recruits everyday logic as a moral weapon.

The key phrase is “known potential weapons.” It’s deliberately elastic. “Known” implies settled expertise and institutional certainty; “potential” keeps the net wide enough to capture objects that are ordinary in most contexts. In other words, he’s arguing for precaution without having to specify limits, the classic advantage of security politics: the threat can always be expanded faster than the rules can be debated.

The 9/11 reference does the heavy lifting. It’s not only an analogy; it’s a shortcut to a national trauma that bypasses a granular discussion of risk probability, civil liberties, and feasibility. By specifying “overcome the crews of four airplanes,” Reichert reminds listeners that small tools can produce catastrophic outcomes, nudging the audience toward a zero-tolerance stance on anything that could be repurposed.

Contextually, this is the voice of a law-and-order politician drawing authority from a security era defined by “never again.” The subtext: inconvenience is a small price; hesitation is complicity; and the government’s first job is to preempt the next headline, even if the policy details remain conveniently unsaid.