As far as I can tell, there’s no such thing as “TSA approved” per se. I’ve certainly seen some advertisements try to imply it, but it doesn’t seem to actually be a thing, and whether or not something can pass is always up to the discretion of individual TSA officers. I think you were sold a bill of goods by the marketing department of your tool maker.
(Pre 9/11, I used to fly with my full size Leatherman in carry-on. I would just unfold it into the pliers mode and hand it to the TSA agent at the metal detector, walk through and they would hand it back to me. Now I never bring any tools on carry on. They always go in checked baggage. Even the mini leatherman tools. Even the ones with just scissors in them.)
In November, the police officer was wearing a valved mask, and none of the TSA front-line staff were wearing aerosol-protective masks (N95 and KN95’s were widely available by then; but the TSA were all wearing gappy procedure masks).
These public-safety agencies seem to have a very narrow interpretation of their public-safety obligations.
I got a few valved N-95s in August and considered myself quite lucky, and maybe even wrong to have them as front line personnel were still being screwed over by shortages and their employers. They were very much still in limited supply at the time and the non-valved medical ones were on allocation. Sketchy KN-95s were more widely available, and being advertised all over Facebook. Even today as real N95s are once again available in hardware stores at pre-pandemic prices, people in medical offices are wearing procedural masks rather than respirators. So while it may be true that “public-safety agencies seem to have a very narrow interpretation of their public-safety obligations”, lack of N95s for cops and TSA in November while there were still shortages in hospitals is not good evidence of that.
Have a Pakistani friend who was born in England, he worked for the NY transit authority at the time, looks a bit hippie or maybe new-age guru with long hair. He had to travel a lot for his job. You may be able to guess this one… “Randomly” searched by TSA at almost every single flight. “Randomly” searched less frequently, but still pretty often after getting his TSA precheck.
Absolutely. Remember there’s much more onerous shit in the Real ID legislation than just drivers licenses. It’s a surreptitious way to extract even more personal data into the massive government surveillance system. It will have little to no impact on improving TSA screenings at airports though.
The only reason I pay for the optional services like preCheck or Clear are the time benefits it affords me of getting through the airport lines faster. When you travel a lot these benefits are worth the trade off of giving up my personal data (data they already have anyway). It’s not a hill worth dying on for me.
You can have ammunition in the case, but it needs to be packed “in a fiber (such as cardboard), wood, plastic, or metal box specifically designed to carry ammunition”. So you can’t have loaded magazines. Exception might be PMags, as they have caps on them that make them meet the definition of “a… plastic… box specifically designed to carry ammunition”.
I have an instructor friend who flies to action shooting matches all the time.
She’s an absolute force of nature. At 78, I saw her hoist a 50lb bag of rice to her shoulder and carry it up two flights of stairs. When I offered to help, she waved me off with an expression that said, “You’re a nice young man, but there’s no way I’m trusting you with this.”
The TSA is lucky she doesn’t use her powers for evil.
Huh. My experience with people from NH has been that if they want a handgun, they don’t want paperwork. That whole ‘Live free or die’ thing gets taken almost comically seriously at points.
What country do you live in? While Europe has more stringent licensing law, but there are ways to travel with firearms, even on planes, as Europe still has both shooting sports and hunting trips people go on. I met a lady on a train in Italy, whose husband was on a hunting trip in the Alps.
