Arthur's Blog: TSA Confiscates 47 Guns in One Week from Air Passengers During Screenings; Incidences on the Rise

A news item which failed last week to get the attention it deserved, reports that in the seven-day period ending September 20, TSA agents around the country discovered and confiscated no fewer than 47 guns that air passengers had packed into their carry-on luggage. Thirty-eight of those guns were fully-loaded, and could have been retrieved from overhead racks to create havoc in a passenger flight, or the storming of a cockpit, or the puncturing of the plane's fuselage. Thankfully, alert TSA agents spotted those weapons (and others) either when alarms were set off or they were discovered during routine pat-downs.
In the year to date, the TSA reports a total of 1,100 guns have been found in carry-on luggage that people have attempted to bring aboard passenger airplanes. An increase in American laws allowing for the "conceal-carry" of handguns has led to the sharp increase in the number of persons attempting to carry loaded weapons aboard airplanes. This has been permitted by a 5-to-4 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court. The persons whose carry-ons were found to have such weapons have all responded, some of them tearfully, that they simply forgot that they had packed the guns into their carry-ons -- that they were innocent of any ill intentions. But so what? It is only the stern conduct of our TSA agents that prevented them from doing so, and can also prevent actual terrorists from bringing weapons onto an airplane. The nature of our security procedures has changed dramatically since the days prior to September 11 when airport security was in the hands of local, private, profit-seeking entrepreneurs paying minimum wage to those who staffed the security belts. It was those people who allowed 19 hi-jackers to board four planes with box cutters, and then fly those seized aircraft into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. I hope that readers will keep this recent concealed-guns-at-airports phenomenon in mind when they read the various dramatic columns and articles attacking the members of the TSA. Those are the articles, you'll remember, which claim that TSA agents actually enjoy patting-down the people who have set off security alarms. In contrast to the rest of us, who have almost always found TSA agents to be acting properly when they administer a pat-down, the alarmists claim that a huge percentage of the TSA are a species of criminals. This is an accusation that none of them can support. We should be grateful to have a serious, dedicated TSA working hard to prevent terrorists from taking weapons onto a passenger airplane and seizing control of it.