TSA’s Jihad Against Guns

by Becky Akers

USA –  -(Ammoland.com)- “Number of seized guns triples at Charlotte airport,” a headline blares. Another article reports “more than 2,600 cases of people trying to bring their gun through security [in airports] across the US in 2015.”

Behind these stats are people: our families and friends, neighbors and fellow enthusiasts of shooting.

Most of them had either overlooked or forgotten the weapon they were carrying, as did “Charlotte[, North Carolina] lawyer John Fennebresque, the former UNC [University of North Carolina] Board of Governors chairman. … Fennebresque told the Observer he didn’t know the gun was in the briefcase.

‘It was an honest, stupid mistake,’ he said.” 

But post-9/11 America no longer requires “criminals” to have motives. And so Mr. Fennebresque “was arrested.” Imagine what that did for his reputation and livelihood. “Police charged him with misdemeanor possession of a firearm on city property. He was released on $500 bail.” 

Indeed, “criminals” don’t even need an actual firearm now. A woman with “a pair of gun-shaped stiletto heels” in her carry-on bag recently tried to board a flight in Baltimore. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) barred such a dangerous sole from flying and then mocked her on social media.

Day after day, the TSA preys on innocent passengers like our fashionista or Mr. Fennebresque. And no wonder: the agency claims to protect aviation from terrorists—but there are mighty few bad guys out there, regardless of how often and loudly our rulers insist otherwise.

Worse, the TSA has never once in fourteen years of pawing us and our belongings caught a skyjacker.

So how does the agency justify its $7 billion annual budget, its evisceration of the very clear, emphatic Fourth Amendment, and its sexual assault—sorry, “enhanced pat-downs” of passengers? Easy: it pretends absent-minded Americans threaten aviation and “saves” us from them.

Yet no evidence supports the widespread, unquestioned assumption that guns at 30,000 feet spell Armageddon. That’s right: not a single study, statistic, or even the most rudimentary research proves that disarming travelers protects them. Stripping us of every defense but our fingernails is based on politics and ideology, not facts.

Indeed, any study would undoubtedly show that armed passengers are safe ones, a la armed citizens on terra firma. What if passengers on those four doomed flights in September 2001 had packed heat? People still might have died, but probably not as many and certainly not as helplessly. If you or someone you loved had been on those planes, would you have preferred that passengers or only the alleged hijackers be carrying?

The TSA’s jihad against guns is merely another front in the feds’ war on the Second Amendment, another effort to render us impotent before our superiors in government. Indeed, given the TSA’s pedophilia before parents’ horrified eyes, its gate-rape of women while their husbands watch, it must disarm the public first. Never has any regime anywhere, at any time, no matter how brutal or totalitarian, groped its subjects wholesale; naturally, the government must guarantee we can’t fight back.

How can we combat this monstrous evil, this second and absurd security theater in the battle for our guns?

First, never for a moment swallow the TSA’s propaganda about its “mission.” Like the rest of the federal government, the TSA exists to destroy our liberty, not to protect us. There are far more effective methods for securing aviation than strip-searching seniors and persecuting patients recovering from cancer.

Second, denounce the TSA to your acquaintances. Anyone who’s flown usually despises the agency, which may account for polls comparing it to the IRS as “most feared.” Yet many Americans bizarrely believe we need the TSA to guard aviation. Remind such folks that the airlines, not taxpayers, should finance aviation’s security just as other industries finance theirs.

Third, we should defend rather than revile our fellow gun-owners who fall into the TSA’s clutches. Blaming these victims as “irresponsible” and prating that owners should always know their weapon’s whereabouts only empowers the TSA and other gun-grabbers.

Finally, boycott commercial aviation (bonus points for emailing your carrier the reason it’s lost your business).  If enough passengers refuse to fly until the TSA disappears, the airlines will demand that Congress dissolve the agency.  Eschewing commercial flights is also the best way to protect yourself and your family from the agency’s perils.

The TSA has killed one passenger and is morally culpable for the death of another; its incompetent buffoons have also damaged aircraft, risking a crash.

The TSA has long trained its sights on gun-owners. Time for us to reverse that.

About the Author:

Becky Akers is a free-lance writer and historian who publishes so voluminously that whole forests of gigabytes have died.

You’ve heard of some of the publications that carry her work (the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, Barron’s, the New York Post, American History Magazine, the Independent Review, Military History Magazine, the Ottawa Citizen, forbes.com); others can only wish you’d heard of them.

She’s also written two novels of the American Revolution, “Halestorm” and its sequel, “Abducting Arnold.”

They advocate sedition and liberty, among other joys, so the wise reader will buy them now, before they’re banned.