Sunday, August 17, 2008
Opinion

No guns at Hartsfield

If GeorgiaCarry.org’s members get their way Hartsfield would be left to the gun-toters...

By Stephanie Ramage

Thank you, U.S. District Judge Marvin Shoob.

Just before Shoob’s ruling on Aug. 11 reaffirming Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport’s ban on guns, a friend informed me that if gun lobby group GeorgiaCarry.org succeeded in overturning the ban, his European business colleagues would stop flying into Hartsfield. Instead, they planned to call on clients in the Southeast from the more civilized airport in Charlotte, N.C., even if it meant catching an additional connecting flight.

I don’t blame them. If GeorgiaCarry.org’s members get their way—and they say Shoob’s ruling is only a delay, not a defeat—Hartsfield would be left to the gun-toters. International flights would decrease dramatically. Americans with any sense would avoid Hartsfield because of substantially increased security delays. Allowing guns there would require, it seems to me, at least two additional security cordons: one on the road entrances into the airport, to make sure any guns taken into the area are carried by legitimate permit holders; and another outside the baggage claim/ticketing area, to make sure that every gun registered as entering comes back out again instead of getting carried onto a flight.

What do the gun-toters plan to do with their guns when they’re going through security, anyway? Hand them off to someone to take back to the car? Do you think that security workers at Hartsfield can be counted on to ensure that guns stay on the ground?

My son and I got on a plane at Hartsfield about a month ago. One week later, at the airport in Bangor, Maine, where we caught a flight to come home, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staffer found a container of sun block in my son’s backpack that was supposed to have been plucked away by TSA at Hartsfield. We all know that things are going to slip through once in a while. But since we already know that, it stands to reason that we have a better chance of preventing guns slipping through if no gun, period, is allowed in any area of the airport, period. Allowing only permitted carries won’t save us: In May, a man attending a folk festival in Washington shot three people. He had a permit to carry a concealed weapon despite having a history of mental illness.

I’m not one of those anti-gun weenies. I happen to be an excellent shot. My father taught me to shoot a .22 rifle when I was in grammar school. When I went off to the University of Georgia, Dad gave me my mom’s old .25 automatic to keep in my purse. After my tiny gun got passed around at a post-exam keg party, I returned it to Dad, because there are some places where guns don’t belong, and one of those places is where there are lots of anxious people having a beer or three—a keg party, for example, or the airport atrium.

Most responsible gun owners know that anywhere one hothead with a gun can shoot several dozen people in one spree isn’t a good place for guns. Even in Laurens County, where I grew up, people didn’t carry guns into churches or schools (although leaving them in the gun rack in your pick-up in the parking lot was OK).

I am a staunch supporter of Second Amendment rights, but shenanigans like GeorgiaCarry.org’s airport foray weaken the entire constitutional argument for the right to own and bear arms. We cannot simultaneously say we need guns for our own protection and then weaken the very laws that are designed to protect us.

About 89 million people come through Hartsfield each year. From January through June of this year, there has been only one violent crime at the airport—an assault, with a knife, on a police officer. Luckily, the perpetrator wasn’t packing heat. SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.