Guns surrendered at airports on record pace

Release the scissors
Later this month Edmund Hawley, the new head of the TSA, will examine a wide range of proposals aimed at improving the performance of passenger and baggage screening at U.S. airports.  Among those proposals are recommendations for revising the list of items currently banned from airline travel. 

TSA staffers proposed allowing smaller knives, ice picks, scissors and bows and arrows back onto flights, according to the Washington Post, which first wrote about the proposals. The easing of the security restrictions for those types of potential weapons was made because TSA evaluators deemed them to be of low risk.

News of the TSA proposal and the continued increase in items caught passing through airport security drew congressional concern Monday.

“I’m glad that TSA is reviewing its screening practices, which several Democratic committee members and I have called for in the past, because after all there is a world of difference between a firearm and cuticle scissors,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security.  “But, I do hope TSA will move forward with caution since the risk that a terrorist would try to overtake a plane has not gone away,” Thompson said.  “We’ll also be watching with great interest to be sure that these changes don’t mean the pendulum swings so far that travelers are made less safe or indiscriminately profiled.”

One security expert brushed aside both the TSA’s proposed revisions and the news of increased weapons grabbed at security check points.

“This is not a relaxation in security, you can’t relax what you don’t have,” said Mike Boyd, an aviation security expert and head of the Colorado-based Boyd Group.  “It’s a change in the screening process,” Boyd said of the potential change in the TSA’s banned items list.

Furthermore, Boyd isn’t surprised or concerned at the record number of firearms and other potential weapons found on airline passengers.  “Not one of them has been confiscated from a terrorist,” Boyd said.  “Not one of them was confiscated from anybody who was going to do damage to an airplane.”

Noting that you can make a weapon by shaving the edge of a credit card to “slit somebody’s throat,” Boyd said he didn’t have any problem with allowing knives or other such objects on board a plane.  “The real issue is what can get on the airplanes from other sources,” he said.  Terrorists are going to have others get their weapons on board, Boyd said.  “They’ll have their buddy cleaning the plane do it for them,” he said.  “Remember a terrorist cell is just that, it’s a well-planned group of people.”

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