Slashdot Mirror
TSA Has Record-Breaking Haul In 2014: Guns, Cannons, and Swords
An anonymous reader writes The TSA has gathered an impressive pile of confiscated weapons this year. In early November the agency had already discovered 1,855 firearms at checkpoints. In addition to guns, they've also collected machetes, hatchets, swords, giant scissors, brass knuckles, cannonballs, bear repellent and, this past October, an unloaded cannon. "Maybe someone has a lucky inert grenade they brought back from some war, or a nice cane was given to them and they forgot that the thing is actually a sword," said Jeff Price, author of Practical Aviation Security, "It's the people that are carrying stuff like chainsaws that make me wonder."
You mean people who work for tree removal services? That makes you wonder?
We had a bad ice storm here last year, I personally know about a dozen people who flew in with their chainsaws to help with cleanup, and pocket sacks of cash since just about every tree in town was damaged.
These were items confiscated, i.e. stolen from citizens. Heaven forbid that American citizens think they have a right to keep and bear arms. Bearing arms is the mark of a terrorist. Not the kind of terrorist who actually blows up buildings or shoots people, mind you, rather just one who plays the part of "Terrorist" in the Security Theater.
Wow. I mean, I travel a ton and get annoyed by the TSA as much as the next guy, but you really think it's OK to take a gun onto an airplane? Agree to disagree. People who need to transport their legally owned firearms can do so through the simple act of checking them. There isn't an airline or country the world over that would allow firearms, not to mention loaded _with rounds chambered_ (FTFA) onto a plane.
We can argue all we want to about the cannon (I'm with the anon who thinks if you manage to hijack a plane with it... congrats!), but guns, grenades, large knives... just check it! This isn't a terrorism thing. It's basic safety 101, especially in an already stressful, crowded environment.
--------------------- -me, Crusher of those who are Foolish (don't be foolish)
zero.
you really think it's OK to take a gun onto an airplane
Not much worse than taking a gun to a shopping mall or movie theater, actually.
We can argue all we want to about the cannon (I'm with the anon who thinks if you manage to hijack a plane with it... congrats!)
You know nothing. You put the cannons at the windows, and shoot at the wings of the other planes. Once they are hit, you throw hooks to hijack and loot! That's how to pirate an airship.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Shopping malls don't tend to depressurize when punctured.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
fear: Americans were once again this year permitted to take their uncodifiable fear of terrorism along each and every flight.
compliance:unquestioned, lock step obedience to a national travel policy thats done nothing to reduce or eliminate terrorism, as domestic events like the Aurora and giffords shooting have simply been redefined as tragedies. Anders Brevik's christian crusade of bloodshed was not stopped by the inability to bring nail clippers onto a plane.
poverty: americans got to take their looming debt, foreclosures, and reposessions along for the ride while dutifully shuffling sixty billion dollars to the department of homeland security, an agency that failed to stop terrorism like the benghazi bombing, or the boston marathon bombing, at all.
Good people go to bed earlier.
From the paternalist, condescending article: Beyond firearms, of course, TSA officers encounter an extremely wide variety of other prohibited items at airport checkpoints, including ... an unloaded cannon.
Because archeologist or collectors should absolutely check in priceless historical artifacts! It's not like baggage handler would steal anything, or the airlines would lose luggage, ho ho, how silly.
Hey, this thing was a firearm once, right? So it's totally justified, innit? Even though the picture even shows that the thing is rusty, unable to fire, and very old.
Do you know how funny it is in Dilbert cartoon when the PHB adopts a tone of condescending smugness to assert misinformed, ill-reasoned opinions? Well, somehow, these bureaucrats don't manage to make it funny.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
If someone had a gun on September 11, 2001 perhaps the history would be different. In Soviet Russia all pilots were armed, and rightly so.
I travel and every day I see pocket knifes, souvenir knifes being stolen at the checkpoints. The other day my credit card size stainless steel multi-tool (ruler, screwdriver, wrench and a 2 centimeter cutting edge) has been confiscated because it had a less than one inch "blade". Yikes.
Every single day passengers bring bottles of whiskey and other alcohol in the glass bottles, which is essentially a ceramic blade/knife, if the bottle is broken. Heck, you can buy alcohol in the airplane.
I have interviewed several airport security directors and directors supplying security solutions. All of them, in private, agreed that this is a security theater.
Shopping malls don't tend to depressurize when punctured.
Neither do aircraft.
The pressurisation pumps are more than capable of keeping up with the amount of air leaking through a thumb-sized hole.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
These people are generally not bringing their gun on an airplane because they want to shoot someone (I can't vouch for everyone's intent). These are people that probably have a valid conceal carry permit, don't normally fly, and just worked out of habit only to have their stuff confiscated. Meaning, that while it was an error they can't get their stuff back.
Do I find an inert hand grenade paperweight to be a terribly frightening weapon? Nope, but the TSA does and confiscates those too. Gag items like giant scissors are not a threat either, well maybe if they were sharpened in in the hands of Chuck Norris (who would be a threat without the giant scissors). A "cannon ball" is not a threat without, well.. a cannon and a good amount of black powder.
Maybe the term "mens rea" is lost on you, but it has been a critical part of western legal systems for centuries. At least until recently anyway. IMHO this is just the TSA trying to A) Justify their job. and B) Attempt to humor us in that attempt.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Pretty much what I thought. Let's compare that to how many of these things would have gotten on a plane pre-security theater.
Guns? Nope. Metal detector. ... heavy. Not dangerous.
Hatchets, Chainsaws and the like? Nope. Metal detector, not to mention that these things are frickin' bulky.
Cannonballs? Erh... Metal detector, but without a cannon they're just
Bear repellant? Oh. No. You could have gotten that on board. Using it would have been a different issue, since yes, you could have maced the whole crew and some passengers... before the rest of the passengers pile up on you and KILL you because they're afraid you might be a 9/11 attacker.
Folks, the 9/11 attacks are like the old trojan horse story (the real one, not the malware). It worked once. ONCE. It will never ever work again. Nobody will ever again go "oh look, a horsie, our enemies made us a present, let's haul it into our fortress!". And neither will people sit down quietly and hope that the hijacking will be over soon. The reason people did that was simply that until 9/11, that's how hijacking worked. You hijack a plane, you demand to fly to some godforsaken country where you trade the passenger hostages against some "political" prisoners. That's how this spiel worked. 9/11 changed that.
I promise you, if there are ever again 4 idiots with carpet knifes trying to hold up a plane, they have exactly ZERO chance of survival. What's the worst that could happen to you if you attack them? Well, they could ... cut you... What WILL happen if you don't? Plane -> Building -> fiery death.
What's the logical thing to do?
CHARGE!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I get what you mean, but an airflow of 10-12psi through metal holes generally doesn't "erode" like that. The metal would have to be extremely weak and brittle already, say pre-fatigued to the verge of failure, in which case the aircraft was already a death-trap.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Err, you know you are not only allowed to lock luggage containing a gun, but you are required to do so? It's spelled out explicitly in the rules.*
While it was a few years ago and the laws may have changed, I read somewhere that you should travel with a starter pistol. The TSA considers them guns, which means you are allowed (required) to securely lock your checked baggage, but (most) states don't consider them weapons, so you can travel with them to different states without multiple concealed carry permits.
* this is with a real lock, not a TSA lock
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I travel and every day I see pocket knifes, souvenir knifes being stolen at the checkpoints. The other day my credit card size stainless steel multi-tool (ruler, screwdriver, wrench and a 2 centimeter cutting edge) has been confiscated because it had a less than one inch "blade". Yikes.
To be fair, John Pistole (the TSA head) tried to drop this restriction and permit knifes with blades <= 2.36 inches, but transportation workers, victims groups, and various congressmen thru a hissy-fit, so he was forced to drop it.
2.36 inches!! Land of the brave, my arse.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
If someone had a gun on September 11, 2001 perhaps the history would be different. In Soviet Russia all pilots were armed, and rightly so.
I travel and every day I see pocket knifes, souvenir knifes being stolen at the checkpoints. The other day my credit card size stainless steel multi-tool (ruler, screwdriver, wrench and a 2 centimeter cutting edge) has been confiscated because it had a less than one inch "blade". Yikes.
Every single day passengers bring bottles of whiskey and other alcohol in the glass bottles, which is essentially a ceramic blade/knife, if the bottle is broken. Heck, you can buy alcohol in the airplane.
I have interviewed several airport security directors and directors supplying security solutions. All of them, in private, agreed that this is a security theater.
No it wouldn't. It wasn't a problem to fight against the hobby knives unarmed either, no one expected the hijackers to be suicide terrorist, and the only thing that would make a difference is hind-sight.
let's also consider that there have been no successful terrorist activity on US airlines since all these measures were put in place.
However, all non-successful attempts were stopped by passengers on the aircraft, not TSA.
TSA cannot point to a single example of a terrorist being stopped by them. Not one.
(And you know they would be shouting it from the rooftops, given that they brag about stealing items from non-terrorists as if their agents had done something good.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Pre-911 being hijacked meant "If you sit down and be quiet, we fly this plane to Cuba, protest for a bit and then everyone goes free. An inconvenience, but nobody gets hurt. If you try to fight back, you'll be killed." So even if someone had a gun in the first two planes, they would have likely kept quiet until it was too late.
The passengers in the third plane did try to shoot back when they found out what happened to the first two planes, but a passenger with a gun might not have made much of a difference. At that point, the terrorists had control of the airplane and even a gun wouldn't have given the passengers the upper hand quick enough to keep the terrorists from crashing the plane.
Nowadays, if someone tries to hijack a plane - even if they intend the "flight to Cuba" kind of hijacking - the passengers are going to rise up, guns or no guns.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
That's because the next time it won't be with carpet knives.
No, it's because hijacking of airplanes ended on 9/11. Unless you can get more hijackers than passengers onto a plane (or at least enough hijackers to physically overpower the passengers) it can no longer work. It only worked before because passengers figured if they just went along all would end well and they would be - at worst - inconvenienced. That changed on 9/11/2001.
There have been people try to hijack planes since then. Here's one story:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-...
6 people tried to hijack a plane - 4 of them survived. I probably don't have to explain it but the other 4 didn't exactly "meet their objectives" if you know what I mean.
Here's a guy who actually had a gun on the plane - I think he was the one who's life was saved by the police who stormed the plane after it landed. He had boiling water thrown on him before the beating:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Again, he had two guns, it didn't matter.
Hijacking was ruined by Mohammed Atta and friends 13 years ago. Since then we had the shoe bomber (failed) and Smokey the Terrorist who set fire to his own penis (brilliant) before being subdued by the other passengers. Even on Flight 77 over Pennsylvania on 9/11/2001 the passengers found out what was going on, but the hijacker was able to ditch the plane before they breached the cabin door. The sap that they had left out to keep an eye on the passengers was burned with boiling water and beaten with a fire extinguisher - keep that in mind in case you have stupid hijacking friends and they want to lock you outside the cabin.
Do you have ESP?
Not only does it let you lock the gun, but there is no way in hell any airport or airline is going to let themselves be "the one who lost a passenger's gun", because that means some criminal somewhere just got their hands on a firearm that they were responsible for transporting safely. If you want your luggage to arrive safely, a starter pistol or flare gun or similar are probably among the best insurance options you can buy.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...