I wish that someone with a squillion $ would take these idiots on in court to bring about a bit of common sense & dampen their pathetic ideas!
Regards Ozzi.
I hope you are talking about the woman.
1. You don't know the accuracy of the reporting. It is after all Fox News, right up there with Cartoon Network.
2. The Screening officers have no choice in the matter, they face an incredible task in filtering out the vast array of potential threats, from toxic materials to firearms to explosives. There are historic pieces that they are expected to find and stop as well as new developments. Size is not a criteria. If you set a definition someone will build something to specifically get around it. You cannot train thousands of officers on every possible detail and expect them to keep up in every variation that comes up. The scope of the task is phenomenal, most people will never realize how difficult it is. The officers are given flat instructions, if it meets this appearance, it does not go. When you have over a million people in the sky at any instant (US alone) you cannot have the officers trying to determine specifics or look things up in order to split hairs. If the officers had let it go it is possible that they could have been held accountable.
3. In the US alone 3957 guns were found in carry on bags last year, over 80% of them loaded. This included the newest plastic "3d printed" guns, which do not look like a conventional firearm at all. I have personally seen a range from pen guns through a panzerfaust (with rocket) that were located by the screening officers.
4. The woman is an idiot, and the story is overblown. The items were not "confiscated". She was given a range of choices - take back to her checked bag, give to someone not travelling, take off-airport (put in your car), mail it off-site, have it held by security or abandon it. She chose to abandon it. Her claims of deep sentimental value went to crap as soon as she heard about the $11.00 fee to have it held. I was surprised to hear that they would have held it for her, that generally will not happen in the US.
I recognize that sometimes there are questionable calls that seem extreme, but in the US one airport alone pushed through over 500,000 passengers through their security checkpoints last week. Keep in mind that on 9-11 four aircraft were brought down with box-cutters. When the US tried to relax some of the regulations on knives a couple of years ago it was the flight crews and airlines that went up in arms to keep the rules in place. If you could see the amount of hazardous crap that people try to sneak through on a daily basis - concentrated acids, toxic materials, knives, guns, clubs, ammunition - you might possibly rethink which side the idiots sit on and which ideas are the more pathetic.