Comments about the Airlines
With
all of the press coverage over the airlines and the "security
procedures that one must go through, I think that it�s necessary to put
my own views on the TSA and the airlines out there.
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 21:18:06 -0600
Is it even vaguely possible that gov.org employees could grow a
brain cell? I've seen the type of "bookmark" in question and
while it MIGHT make an expedient blackjack, why bust a 52 year old
woman?
Teacher Arrested After Bookmark Called Concealed Weapon September 17, 2004
TAMPA, Fla. -- A weight may soon be
lifted off a Maryland woman charged with carrying a concealed weapon in
an airport. It wasn't a gun or a knife. It was a weighted
bookmark. Kathryn Harrington was flying home from vacation last month
when screeners at the Tampa, Fla., airport found her bookmark.
It's an 8.5-inch leather strip with small lead weights at each end.
Airport police said it resembled a
weighted weapon that could be used to knock people unconscious. So the
52-year-old special education teacher was handcuffed, put into a police
car, and charged with carrying a concealed weapon. She faced a possible
criminal trial and a $10,000 fine. But the state declined to prosecute,
and the Transportation Security Administration said it probably won't
impose a fine.
Harrington said she'll never again carry her bookmark into an airport.
The writer is asking for reason or
common sense in TSA ranks when there is three years of evidence that's
available just a few mouse-clicks away that such reason or common sense
just isn't there.
Confiscate the item and send her on her way.
Not on behalf of any airline that I'll
fly. Short of life-and-death situations (a close friend or relative on
the deathbed or in the hospital in critical-or-worse condition), I'll
reserve my airline usage for the first such company that lets me board
the plane with one of my Glocks in plain view on my belt.
Don't get me wrong here, folks, I have
no problem with flying per se. What I have problems with are the ways
that the airlines and the FAA/TSA treat people as they get onto and off
of the aircraft. I wasn't too keen on this bullshit back in 1991 when I
flew from Philadelphia, PA to Columbus, GA, for my Basic Training. When
I met Tom Knapp here in Albuquerque in August 2001 as he had a layover
here for an hour, the clown who wanded me looked like I should've been
wanding him -- and now this bozo is getting 18-20 FRNs per hour from my
paycheck via taxation?
Since when did a 2-inch pair of mini-nail-clippers become a deadly weapon?
Add to this:
the routine overbooking
- the way they put total strangers next to me (who NEVER seem to shut
the fuck up) when I'm traveling with a party, thus separating me from
said party
- the way that they let passengers three rows down put their excess baggage in my overhead bin
- the bullshit games they play with luggage -- I've wondered if
I'd see my stuff again -- especially on the way back from Salt Lake
City from the 2000 LRT Conclave (had to change planes at Las Vegas and
part of my luggage was my cased SAR-8)
People treat you a whole hell of a lot better when you're visibly armed.
"An armed society is a polite society."
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon
Plus you're safer -- look up "Project Safe Skies" on Google.
All of the hyperbole that a shot being fired while in flight will cause
the plane to explosively decompress is just that -- hyperbole. And
should a window get popped out -- isn�t that exactly why they install
those funky oxygen masks that pop down from the overhead bulkhead?