Do Not Bring Your Gun To The Airport, People

“Furloughed and broke,” Mark Howell said to friends on his birthday a couple of weeks ago. He’s smiling in his pictures, but he’s plainly pissed off and I can’t blame him.

Mark is the Transportation Safety Administration spokesperson for Hartsfield-Jackson airport and the rest of the southeastern United States. He spent the day with his young daughter, instead of fielding phone calls about a gun found in the luggage of a passenger to Japan over the weekend.

I can scarcely believe Mark is 40. Mark and I were barracks roommates while serving in the same public affairs unit in the Army. He was an 18-year-old Army broadcaster while I was a 23-year-old reporter for the Hawaii Army Weekly. My friend knows exactly how much of a slob I am and I know the kind of women he’s chased (and been chased by), thus we remain eternally bound in a state of mutual respect and fear.

Mark stayed in when I left in 1998. He was the Army’s voice of Iraq for a time with a morning broadcast to troops in the green zone. Mark joined the TSA as a public affairs officer after leaving the Army and rose rapidly through the ranks. It is a cosmic coincidence – and a statement about Atlanta’s power to attract strivers – that we’ve both landed here 20 years later.

I had planned to write a story after the traditional pre-Thanksgiving TSA briefing, and then broke my arm on a Bird scooter in a moment of personal idiocy. Given the creeping lunacy of the moment with TSA agents hitting the local food banks, I think it’s still worth a word about the personal idiocy of the rest of us.

Do not bring your gun to the airport.

Once more, for the women in the back: DO NOT BRING YOUR GUN TO THE AIRPORT.

Women? I am specifically calling out women gun owners because it seems that women are more likely to be found with a gun in their carry-ons than men, U.S. Attorney BJay Pak said after the briefing. This, though fewer than 40 percent of concealed carry permits have been issued to women. People forget from time to time that the extra pound of weight in the bottom of the handbag they never empty out is a Sig P238 or a Colt Mustang Pocketlite 380.

The arrest of a woman earlier this year with a handgun in her purse on the way to Japan speaks to the potential calamity before us as the Super Bowl descends on Atlanta.

If that seems like an extraordinary oversight for a gun owner … it is. Four and a half million people fly out of Hartsfield-Jackson every month. The TSA in Atlanta catches an average of about 20 guns a month. That’s about one catch for every 225,000 people, or about one in every 3,300 flights.

The problem, of course, is that every time someone is found with a gun in their handbag or suitcase, the cops have to come haul them away, which slow the rest of us down. And in Atlanta it happens almost daily.

Atlanta’s hallowed airport represents about 5.7 percent of domestic air travel in a metro area that’s only about 1.8 percent of the United States. Even though Atlanta is the country’s busiest airport, it still accounts for more guns at the TSA check than it should. At 245 gun catches in 2017, about 6.2 percent of all of the guns the TSA found in the U.S. were found here. Dallas Fort Worth nudged Hartsfield-Jackson out of first place this year, but Atlanta overachieves in gun dumb.

A hundred thousand extra people will be in town for the big game. Some of them are going to buy guns here, because that is exactly the flavor of insane we are in America.

If you are visiting, and you want to buy a gun in Georgia, please buy your gun from a licensed dealer and have the gun shipped by UPS to another licensed dealer in your home state, or put it in your checked luggage. Shake your carry-ons out just to be sure. Have a loved one give you a pat down before taking an Uber to the airport.

And tip your Uber driver, because there’s a fair chance she’s a TSA agent on furlough burning sick time while driving rideshare to keep from being evicted.

Do not presume you’re going to get away with it.

If you did manage to sneak one by while coming here, go to a firearms dealer and have the gun shipped home, or put it in your checked baggage. You’re not going to get lucky twice.