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The TSA: Keeping You Safe from Teenagers’ Purses and Little Old Ladies Posted: 03 Dec 2011 12:11 PM PST Why do we allow the TSA to continue to exist? This is a serious question, folks. There isn’t a person alive who can name one terrorist the TSA has caught, not one plot the agency’s automatons have thwarted with their rigid adherence to rules built by brainless bureaucrats. On the other hand, your next airplane trip will be completely free of young, pregnant women with plastic ornamental guns on their purses. Vanessa Gibbs, 17, claims the Transportation Security Administration stopped her at the security gate because of the design of a gun on her handbag. Gibbs said she had no problem going through security at Jacksonville International Airport, but rather, when she headed home from Virginia. “It’s my style, it’s camouflage, it has an old western gun on it,” Gibbs said. But her preference for the pistol style didn’t sit well with TSA agents at the Norfolk airport. Gibbs said she was headed back home to Jacksonville from a holiday trip when an agent flagged her purse as a security risk. “She was like, ‘This is a federal offense because it’s in the shape of a gun,’” Gibbs said. “I’m like, ‘But it’s a design on a purse. How is it a federal offense?’” After agents figured out the gun was a fake, Gibbs said, TSA told her to check the bag or turn it over. By the time security wrapped up the inspection, the pregnant teen missed her flight, and Southwest Airlines sent her to Orlando instead, worrying her mother, who was already waiting for her to arrive at JIA. Did you catch that little “After agents figured out the gun was a fake…” bit? Here’s a picture of the purse, with the hard-to-tell-if-it’s-fake gun firmly affixed to it along with the dastardly would-be terrorist teenager who carried it. Instapundit called the TSA’s actions “pathetic”. He’s pulling his punches. This is an agency that routinely humiliates us for no better reason than it can, whose agents are locked into “proper procedures” that allow them a tyrannical level of control over anyone who wishes to fly on an airplane. And believe me, if you don’t think those agents who use that power to the hilt aren’t enjoying themselves, then you know nothing at all about human nature. It’s not enough to have power; you have to use it. You know, like they used it on this frail 85-year old woman when they pulled her aside and strip-searched her without even a shred of evidence that she was dangerous to anything but a bowl of tapioca pudding. When Zimmerman reached a security checkpoint, she asked if she could forgo the advanced image technology screening equipment, fearing it might interfere with her defibrillator. She said she normally gets patted down. But this time, she says that two female agents escorted her to a private room and began to remove her clothes. "I was outraged," said Zimmerman, a retired receptionist. As she tried to lift a lightweight walker off her lap, she says, the metal bars banged against her leg and blood trickled from a gash. "My sock was soaked with blood," she said. "I was bleeding like a pig." She says the TSA agents showed no sympathy, instead pulling down her pants and asking her to raise her arms. "Why are you doing this?" she said she asked the agents, who did not respond. The TSA says “proper procedures were followed”. Of course they were — that’s the problem. The United States of America should never have a government agency with a policy that allows its agents to strip-search an innocent grandmother. Yet we do. So what are we going to do about it?

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