Have gun, will travel

And here’s another item that’s left the Bellyacher’s scratching our collective heads, and one that gets filed in that overloadedfile folder labeled: ‘Only in America’.

If the Christmas Day bombing attempt in Detroit by the ‘underwear bomber’ was weird and frightening enough, a recent news item is tad weirder and possibly way more frightening.

The fact that Americans seem to have a perverse love of guns of all sorts is well known. But did you know that some of them like to bring their guns with them!? And apparently that includes on airplanes.

The Transportation Security Administration has said that during the week after the underwear bomber incident, only 12 guns were confiscated at airport security checkpoints around the US. Wow we thought, that’s very weird — why are people showing up with their guns? Are they all air marshal wannabes, or maybe just taking that constitutional ‘own a gun to protect the nation’ thing to the extreme. Maybe they’ve just been living under a rock for the last decade and have no idea about aviation safety and security.

But the part of this story that is the real highlight, isn’t the fact that the TSA screeners confiscated 12 guns, post-underwear bomber, but that the 12 guns were a significant dip from the average35-40 per week that they normally find!

What the....???

But fear not, aviation security expert Douglas R. Laird of Laird & Associates made sense of the situation for us. Laird told AOL News that, first off, “most people don’t realise they have guns with them when they go to the airport. I don’t know of any incident anywhere where they were actually trying to do something harmful to the aircraft.”

Nonetheless, Laird said: “When an event takes place such as Christmas Day, it brings security checkpoints to people’s minds, and they do a better job of checking their hand luggage before going through a checkpoint.”

But Laird said awareness is likely to dissipate “over time, and the number of guns seized will go back to normal levels.”

Umm, sorry Mr Laird, but there is nothing ‘normal’ about a situation in which people don’t actually realise they have a gun in their bag! I mean where these people living — Afganistan, Iraq,Darfur? Nope, just the United States…