TSA Union Calls for Armed Employees; Everybody with Common Sense Recoils at the Idea

Shooting you in the face is one
of the few awful things the Transportation Security
Administration’s employees can’t do to you.

But one guy loses his mind (maybe) and kills one and obviously
the next thing that’s going to happen is a fearmongering response
designed to create more jobs and give the most intrusive, invasive
government agency we’ve created (because at least the National
Security Agency can’t physically fondle you) more power.
Politico notes the TSA union’s response:

The fatal shooting of Gerardo Hernandez and the ensuing gunfight
at LAX called attention to a long-running debate over the powers of
TSA, whose screeners aren’t considered law enforcement officers
even though many of them wear badges. The 39-year-old Hernandez was
the first TSA officer killed in the line of duty in the agency’s
history.

Federal prosecutors have filed homicide and other charges
against 23-year-old Los Angeles resident Paul Ciancia, whom
authorities have suggested was specifically targeting TSA
employees.

Both lawmakers and the Obama administration have called for
reviewing airport security procedures after the shooting spree. But
union officials are already offering a concrete proposal: create a
new category of TSA agent in addition to the 45,000 existing
screeners. People in the new positions would be law enforcement
officers, who could carry handcuffs and firearms as well as make
arrests.

Union leaders say the enhanced status would help protect an
unfairly demonized workforce, as well as security checkpoints like
the one where Friday’s mayhem began.

One person’s “unfairly demonized workforce” is another person’s
stolen
iPads and
parking passes, brutal
humiliation, ignorance-based
ethnic discrimination and nearly
10,000 complaints of misconduct over two years.

It doesn’t seem likely that this rather extreme response is
going to get much of anywhere. CNN reports
objections from Congress members, police unions protecting
their turf, and even former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge thinks it’s not
a good idea:

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge called the idea of
arming officers a “a big mistake.”

“You have literally hundreds and hundreds of armed police
officers roaming every major airport in America. And I don’t think
arming another 40 or 50 or 60 thousand people … would have
prevented this incident from happening,” he said.

During CNN’s rather terrible coverage of the shooting on Friday,
some talking head (possibly with the union or TSA, but I missed the
identification) complained that TSA agents are “sitting ducks” in a
live-shooter scenario. Funny, so are the rest of us, by government
diktat.