TSA Confiscates Raygun Belt Buckle BECAUSE TERRORISM!

Award-winning
videographer Sean
Malone had a raygun belt buckle confiscated recently by the good
folks at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). You
know, because all of the 9/11 hijackers were packing rayguns or
something.

Malone emails that the pinch happened at LAX:

Same thing almost happened at DCA on my way out to Los
Angeles on Sunday, but I argued with them until I got a high
enough level supervisor to get it back.

Didn’t have time this morning to fight it because I was already
late for boarding when it started.

They called it a “replica” of a weapon….

PS. Here
is what I wrote on FB Sunday when they tried to take it
at DCA:

Now that I’m in a restaurant in Philly, I have time to share
more of the stupidity. First, they did a bag check, which happens
to me every time I fly anyway, so who cares. When I walked over,
the guy said, “Yeah, there’s something in there that’s kind of
shaped like a gun,” to which I replied, “Yeah. It’s a belt
buckle.”…

He pulled it out of the bag and
looked at it. Yep. Belt buckle. He didn’t seem like an idiot, but
he called his supervisor over, who instantly made it clear to me
that she was one of those petty authoritarian, logic-impaired
idiots you often come to expect in positions of middling power in
law enforcement. Her word was law… Even when, you know, it wasn’t
actually law. She said, “Listen, you can either go back out of
security and put this in your check luggage (which I don’t have),
or we’ll confiscate it.”

But this is honestly my favorite belt buckle, and I’m me, so –
realizing I was speaking with a woman with the brainpower of a
block of Parmesan cheese – I looked at her and said, “You
understand that this is a belt buckle, right? It is not a danger to
the safety of anyone nor is it against the law to carry. I have
also traveled with this belt buckle all over the country and it’s
never been a problem. So please explain to me how exactly you would
justify taking it.”

Her response was to suggest a hypothetical scenario. “What if”,
she postulated, “you take this object out of your bag and point it
– like a gun – at a police officer? He would have no choice to
assume that it was a gun, and take action against you.”

Now… Let’s leave aside for a second that the entire premise
behind this argument is that police officers are too dumb and
hopped up on their own power that they can’t recognize a dangerous
weapon from a belt buckle in the shape of a 1950’s toy ray gun. I’m
glad she recognized this reality, but I don’t think she really
processed what it says about law enforcement in America. But
leaving that aside… Why in the hell would I ever take my belt
buckle and point it at a police officer?

To this, she had no answer.

She also had no answer to the point that even if I did that, it
would represent a danger to me and not, say… an airplane full of
people.

At this point, she got red in the face and loudly declared that
she wasn’t going to argue with me or “have a debate about this”.
“You have two options. That’s it,” she said. So I asked to speak
with *HER* supervisor. Fine. She took the belt buckle and walked it
over to some other guy far out of earshot and talked to him for a
bit while someone else came over and talked to me. Also seemed like
a fairly reasonable guy.

Eventually the woman came back, curtly handed me the buckle and
said, “Here you go. Have a good flight, sir.”

— I was super late at LAX and I basically got to stage two
where mid level supervisor said I couldn’t take it on the plane and
didn’t have enough time to argue up the chain of command.

The agent at LAX said that it’s policy to reject all replica
weapons.

I pointed out that even if it was a “replica”, which is dubious,
it would be a replica of a fictional weapon used by Flash Gordon…
Which, you know, makes confiscation of the belt buckle even MORE
insane than it already was.