Perking Pretty Normal This AM...

I'm back to reasonably normal this AM...I may even try to get in a bicycle this afternoon before the weekly weekend snowstorm rolls in. Since I've had a major shingles attack in the past and it almost blinded me, I've been instructed by my doctors to try and head off any subsequent attack. If I catch the precursors of an attack — which is not hard, since it's sort of like a sheet metal screw being driven into my head — I can head it off. That seems to have worked, so all good.

I see that the Third Circuit has upheld the arrest of a Utah man for illegal possession of a firearm at the Newark, NJ, airport (Snowflakes in Hell, here & here). In short, the man got bumped while he was transiting through Newark. As is usual when you get badly bumped, he was forced by the airline to reclaim his luggage, which included his legally declared firearm. He took the luggage to his hotel room, and when he checked in the next morning he was arrested for illegally possessing a firearm in New Jersey. He spent 4 days in jail; then the charges were apparently dropped (Say Uncle),

This is a huge issue for those of us who travel weekly with firearms. The airports that do not honor Firearms Owners Protection Act (FOPA) include Newark, the Chicago airports, the New York City airports and the Boston airport. D.C. Reagan is suspect, because you end up in D.C., duh. For the most part, it's easy to work around the northeastern airports — Philly instead of NYC; Manchester NH instead of Boston. Chicago, though, is a big problem, as much of the traffic in the central U.S. goes there, abd the airports are a crap shoot in the winter. I've spent more time sleeping on the floor of O'Hare than all the other bumped flight combined and squared. My own solution is to schedule the trips for the non-stops and where that's not possible to route through Dallas or Philly, in case I'm bumped. Worst case is getting stuck in a big eastern storm, where you can no longer pick your flights but have to grab wha's available...for example, a year or so ago I was flying out of Manchester with guns and a storm whacked most of the East Coast...the only flights I could get if I wanted to fly that week was a double hop, Manchester-Reagan, Reagan-Chicago, Chicago-Denver...I sweated bullets, so to speak, the entire time.

I check in the day before on the computer so I'll know in advance if there are problems...this has allowed me to ship guns home to myself rather than carry them on the planes when I got rerouted through a bad airport. Say Uncle, through a firearms attorney, has an interesting solution I've never thought of — if you end up stuck in a bad airport and you're forced to reclaim your baggage, find a local cop BEFORE you claim your baggage, explain your situation and ask whether the firearms can be stored for you until you're ready to board the plane. I have no idea whether that will work or not, but it beats a trip to the slam!

This obviously shouldn't happen. The FOPA, which apparently applies only to vehicles, says that if you're legal in your home state and you're legal in the state you're traveling to, and the firearm is encased and inaccessible, you're protected no matter what states you drive through. It's utterly irrational that this doesn't apply to airports.