Tsk, Tsk, You Irresponsible Serfs. But At Least You’re Better than the DHS

As reliably as Christmas comes in December and a new year in January, so the TSA brags throughout those two months about how many guns it stole from passengers during the preceding twelve. Newspaper after newspaper after TV station after website annually reports on the TSA’s plunder, usually mocking or even damning its victims. Naturally, neither Our Rulers nor their lapdogs in the corporate media ever presume that the myriad, often contradictory and always absurd rules about what we can and cannot carry onto a plane might be at fault; no, it’s always our stupidity and forgetfulness that forced the TSA to rob us of our belongings.

And so USAToday treats us to yet another of these sneering articles: “You’d think by now that word would be out that you can’t take a gun — especially a loaded gun — past airport security checkpoints and onto airplanes. But no. According to a report issued last week by the Transportation Security Administration, during 2015 the agency found a record 2,653 firearms in carry-on bags at airport checkpoints.”

Now, part of the government’s propaganda on aviation is that guns are bad, even worse than they are on the ground. But not a shred of evidence confirms this, at least that I can find (and if any of you know of pertinent studies or stats, please alert me): it’s simply more of the scorn politicians and bureaucrats hurl at the Second Amendment. Indeed, weapons would come in mighty handy were hijackers to attack a plane, especially since passengers are among the TSA’s 20 vaunted “layers of protection”—though one it has stripped of every defense but our fingernails. (By the way, catch this brilliance from one of those disgusted “layers”: “…I re-read Kippie’s [Kip Hawley, formerly the TSA’s Head Cheese] testimony. It’s now clear to me that Kippie included ‘passengers’ as Layer #20 in order to someday be able to blame us for an in-flight security failure. ‘Unfortunately, Senator, Layer #20 failed yesterday, which is why the airplane got hijacked. All other 19 layers directly under my control performed perfectly.’
I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t remember either volunteering for for [sic] or being drafted into the TSA.” Indeed!)

Alas, neither facts nor logic matter when Our Rulers or Their Lapdogs mount the soapbox against our guns. USAToday reliably wags its finger at all the “people [who] claim they just ‘forgot’ they had a firearm in their bag.” 

But it may want to scold another group that misplaces its guns far more often than we do: the thugs at the Department of Homeland Security. “DHS had over 188,000 firearms issued over eight component agencies…”; in 31 months, 165 of those went missing. That may amount “to less than one-tenth of a single percent”–but compare that average to passengers’. With something like 720 million “emplanements” every year, and the TSA’s finding only 2654 guns in 2015, we score a mere .0000376%. (Yes, yes, I know: we must multiply to compensate for the 95% that eluded the TSA. But that still keeps us well under the DHS’s level.)

I await USAToday’s apology to those of you still flying and its reprimand of Our Rulers. Something tells me Christmas and New Year’s will roll around again first.

Share

1:49 pm on January 28, 2016