A Washington state senator was arrested at the airport in Hong Kong and charged with possession of an unregistered firearm, his office said.
Sen. Jeff Wilson, R-Longview, was detained at Hong Kong International Airport on Friday night after he found a pistol in his carry-on bag and reported it to customs officials.
He was released on bail Sunday and faces a hearing Oct. 30.
he passed through security at the airport in Portland, Oregon, where it was not detected by baggage screeners.
Tonight on TSA’s security theatre
As long as you can buy all the ingredients to build an IED from the duty-free shop after the screening, you’ll know how much TSA’s “security” is worth.
Had a razor taken off me at security. Went through, bought a magazine with the same one taped to the cover as a free gift
it was encased in a security magazine though (men’s health, etc).
What’s ironic here is that this isn’t a matter of incompetence, it’s a matter of efficiency. There isn’t much of a threat of hijacking airplanes, and there never has been. It’s just that after 9/11 the spectacle of that even has caused the average person to overestimate the threat of terrorism in airports by several orders of magnitude. Therefore, while we’re in no more danger than we were on 09/10/2001, people believe that there is a danger and if someone doesn’t perform security, they won’t fly. So, in order to appease these people who don’t actually understand the situation but have the power to affect it, we all have to go through a little dance that’s designed to look very much like security. Take your shoes off. Throw out your water bottle. Has anyone asked you to put anything in your bag for them? Put your shoes back on. Take your shoes back off. 95% of weapons in carry-on luggage make it through TSA screening and onto the plane. Put your shoes back on. Take your belt off.
To be fair, the number of incidents was much higher in the 60s and 70s. Usually in the high 60s low 70s oddly enough, per year. Not really relevant nowadays, but an interesting fact.
https://fee.org/articles/tsa-fails-95-of-the-time/
An internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials, ABC News has learned.
In one test an undercover agent was stopped after setting off an alarm at a magnetometer, but TSA screeners failed to detect a fake explosive device that was taped to his back during a follow-on pat down.
And yet my hands get swapped 10 years later for bringing a pair of sumo robots in my luggage.
Can’t tell you how many times my bag has been flagged because of my fucking Kindle.
My bag is almost always flagged because almost every flight I am on is for work travel and I have my tools in it. I found stuff gets stolen less often if I put a checklist on the top. At least by America. The Canadian security stole a whole mess of cables as well as the checklist.
LOL they just pick on a few of us so we spread the word that they’re vigilant.
I know federal Congress doesn’t have to go through airport security. I’m guessing it’s the same for state?
Australian here… I have never actually touched a handgun, in fact, I have never seen a handgun with my eyeballs outside of police/security… it is weird how casual this seems
“Woops, got so many firearms I didn’t even notice one was misplaced into my bag”
And americans think that’s normal
“I’m a responsible gun owner!” say every irresponsible gun owners.
Fuck the USA and its constitution, it even becomes an issue the next country over because idiots get their firearms stolen and they make their way to Canada so gang members can shoot each other and kill bystanders at the same time.
There are a lot of us here that would like to change things.
I used to work at a place where a guy would bring his guns in his truck to work every day.
To work in sales in an office in an industrial estate.
They were locked in that metal case in the back of his Ram, but if you were robbing a truck isn’t that the first place you’d look? I also am willing to bet they weren’t disassembled, cased, ammo separate either.
I’m older than most of y’all, 70. In high school, it was not unusual to have the student parking lot filled with pickup trucks…most of which had shot guns on gun racks hanging on the back window.
It’s so weird to think about that now, how very normal it seemed at the time.
My older buddy tells me about how he used to bring his rifle on the school bus because he was on the high school shooting team. In and of itself, I don’t think anyone can say such a change is either good or bad, just that the culture is different, as it always is after as many years.
Same for me. I have been around guns most of my life and seeing them in trucks was very common. Hell, me and my friends all owned .22’s at a minimum and nobody cared when we wanted to go shooting. Where I grew up it was just… normal.
The big difference being about 5 billion more people on the planet since then and now.
100% what you break into. Its exposed, and the exact place most people keep expensive tools and stupid people keep guns.
A guy I worked with had a handgun with permits and stored in his car. We made torpedo parts for the navy. HR found out and sent an email about weapons on the premises. Hehe
I was in the military, I regularly practice and teach responsible use and ownership. My background checks are clean and I never use firearms while under the influence of anything. All of my firearms are well maintained and locked away or disabled when they are not.
Guns are just guns. They are fun to shoot and a useful tool for hunting. Quite honestly, I love the precision engineering that it takes to contain up to 65,000 psi and direct that energy in a controlled manner.
Your generalization of responsible gun owners is bad, unfortunately. You seem to demonize people blindly and that is simply not healthy and not fair to people who actually respect what these tools actually are.
I am guessing your experience around firearms is basically nil and that is OK! Fear of them is a natural thing and is healthy to maintain a deep respect for any kind of high energy machinery.
What is the leading cause of death for children in the US again?
Stop deflecting with rehtorical questions. It’s kinda hostile. But, to answer the question anyway, it’s fairly close between motor vehicles, firearms, cancer and just “normal” accidents.
My point, is that you are generalizing a group of people based on the behaviors of a minority. You can call me an idiot to my face for any reason that you would like for anything that I have said. Totally cool. You cannot group me in with a subset of people that you believe are all the same. That is completely unrealistic.
It’s not a rhetorical question, and what the fuck is fairly close lol? There is a right answer here, big guy.
The person that asked the question was someone other than the person you originally replied to (me).
My comment was just pointing out the truth, all irresponsible gun owners talk like they are responsible gun owners. You might be a responsible gun owner, it doesn’t make what I say any less true.
It also doesn’t change the fact that US guns make their way to my country and people get killed using them and these guns come, in part, from people who called themselves responsible owners and who got their gun(s) stolen.
Canada should stop exporting alcohol. In my opinion, that is a much more potent killer than guns will ever be.
Crown Royal, and the responsible consumers of that product, should be held responsible for all deaths and domestic abuse caused by their products. The people that get drunk aren’t the issue, so we should just ban alcohol completely.
People who say they are responsible consumers of alcohol are actually not. They actually hide bottles of booze from their family and get completely blitzed whenever they have the chance.
Before you dismiss my example as a false equivalence, and to a degree it is, I can’t help but see your logic as a shift of blame per my example.
If someone gets drunk and beats their kids, that person is at fault. If someone stabs someone else with a knife, that person is also at fault. If your car gets stolen and it is used to run people over, it’s the fault of the thief.
If someone shoots someone else with a stolen gun, it’s now the fault of responsible gun owners who may also be victims of crimes (theft) themselves.
I should also point out that words are not actions. People can say anything they want. If someone says they are responsible and they actually aren’t, that can create a risky situation. Guns aside, that is life in general. If people act irresponsibly, they should be treated as such. If they drink too much, send them to a doctor. If they don’t obey traffic laws, send them to remedial training and suspend their license after that if necessary. If they can’t operate a firearm or follow laws, take their guns.
Also, in my personal experience, irresponsible gun owners talk like irresponsible gun owners. In general, irresponsible people act like irresponsible people which is much easier to identify.
Alcohol is easy to make at home so no way to realistically ban it, plenty of campaigns to lower it’s consumption.
Knives are necessary to make food and are easy to make at home, already illegal to carry knives over a certain size.
Cars are necessary for personal transportation because of the way our countries are developed, manufacturers are making them safer and harder to steal.
Guns? Neither necessary or easy to make at home, manufacturers make them more efficient at killing, easy to ban.
The only reason these guns exist in Canada is because USA has the gun culture it has, make all guns disappear from the USA and Canada and see how little will illegally make the way inside both countries. The fact that you guys have such easy access to guns is the issue, no matter how safely you store them, if someone enters your house without you noticing, points one at your head and tells you to open your safe to steal your firearms, you’ll do it while pissing your pants and say thank you if they don’t shoot you before leaving.
Sure, people are the issue, the object isn’t. What you guys don’t get is that all people who want to own guns are the issue, not just irresponsible owners.
I’m sorry but you cannot blame the US for gun crimes in CA, that’s absurd.
Pretty much all guns used for crimes in Canada illegally made their way to Canada from the USA, that’s just a fact.
It’s a false dichotomy. There is no such thing as responsible gun owners and irresponsible gun owners, just gun owners. Believe it or not, human beings are frail and emotional creatures, prone to decompensation. Most of us will die without our faculties or dignity intact. It is this feature of humanity that makes gun ownership so dangerous.
Along with the absolute nut jobs who’s gullibility and lack of integrity seem to know no limit when it comes to interpreting the Second Amendment.
Alright. Now apply this to cops and the military.
Shouldn’t be. But here in oh USA we treat it as our first born son. 🤦♂️
You aren’t missing much.
Idiots do idiotic things. Who let this idiot on a plane with a gun in the first place?
TSA
Theatre of Security Agency
Run for public office and get 5 weeks vacation time with your beloved firearm while you deny basic human decency for the people who elect you.
Offer valid only if you have the magic ‘R’ next to your name
How do people do this by accident?
They’re very, very stupid.
It’s not an accident
He found the gun itself and turned it in. Why would he have it with him on purpose when he willingly decided to turn it in? It wasn’t found by airport authorities first.
Aye. I think Hanlon’s razor actually applies here. Wacky as that is.
They’re irresponsible gun owners is how.
I assume he’s used to just blithely carrying around guns everywhere without thinking about it.
I wish the Hong Kong police and judicial system well in dealing with this asshole.
As in: “Keep 'em as long as you want”?
Fine by me. One less insurrectionist.
Also, some people are saying he’s a spy. They might want to look into that.
I hope he loses his concealed carry permit at the very least.
The Senator, pulled away by police with his pants round his ankles, “Hey, I thought this was America?!”
He’s from Longview, so that tracks better than you realize.
