traveling with a weapon

The Air Force has declared that everyone going to the desert will carry a weapon. This is a stupid policy that makes all of our travel slower and less secure.

While carrying a weapon, I am only allowed to use a GOV to travel when I am not on a military base, and I have to maintain physical control of the weapon at all times. So, for example, yesterday when I checked in for my flight at an airport on the east coast three hours before I could check baggage, I had to find a place to stow my luggage, and wandered around the airport with an M-9 pistol in my backpack. I wonder how everyone around would have felt had they known. (Granted, it was unloaded (and I never had ammunition for it) and inside a case secured with two locks, but nevertheless, it is a gun in an airport.) Interestingly, the people at the check in counter rarely bat an eye when you tell them this, I believe in large part due to the war, which has a lot of military folks both in an out of uniform traveling with weapons these days.

To travel with a weapon, all you need to do is claim that the weapon is unloaded and being transported in a locked case (which is of course a checked bag, not a carry on). They give you a blaze orange tag with confirms this and you sign it and put in inside the case.

When I got off the plane in Vegas, my bags didn't, since they didn't make the connecting flight that I did. I could have just taken a cab or gotten a ride home from a friend and had them deliver the bags, but instead I did the prescribed thing and waited there for the bags to arrive on a later flight while calling trans from the base to come and get me. They carried me to the base armory where I left the weapon and then a friend picked me up.

So every person going to the middle east has to carry a weapon and it means an extra 1-4 hours at each commercial stop you make, and you have a whole bunch of guns floating around out in the system. Or you could fly a single military cargo plane to the desert and set up an armory there. The Air Force chose the former.