Our Rulers’ excuse for the TSA is that it protects aviation by keeping dangerous items like guns off planes (by the way, no study anywhere has ever proven that passengers robbed of all defenses but their fingernails are any safer than armed ones—and common sense argues that they aren’t). But like all else about the agency, this claim too is a lie, and the TSA proved it over the weekend.  A “rapper … known as Juelz Santana … left the security checkpoint area Friday at … Newark Liberty International Airport, leaving behind two bags and identification” after the TSA’s busybodies “found a loaded Derringer 38-caliber handgun” in one of those bags. Give the man credit for style: “Police believed he fled the airport in a taxicab.”

Now, the story should end there if the tyrannical, anti-Constitutional TSA truly existed to cleanse aircraft of weapons rather than to enslave us. Mr. Santana’s gun detected and stolen–sorry, confiscated, Mr. Santana skipping his flight: mission accomplished. But no. Instead, cops continued pursuing this guy—who has yet to commit any crime, unless we count his blows against music—until they arrested him this morning. (Once upon a time, the charge, “possession of a firearm by a convicted felon,” wouldn’t have possibly stuck, since the State found that gun without even the pretense of a warrant.)

Good thing the Clowns in Gowns have declared that the TSA’s assaults are “not a resented intrusion on privacy, but, instead, a welcome reassurance of safety,” and that “[T]he danger [of skyjacking] is so overwhelming, and the invasion of privacy so minimal, that the [Fourth Amendment’s] warrant requirement is excused by exigent national circumstances.” Otherwise, we might worry that the Constitution’s completely dead and we’re living in a police-state.

The Best of Becky Akers