About a year after 9-11 I was going through security at the airport here in Montana. I had a coat on that I used hunting that fall, and unbeknown to me there was a spent 300 WSM case in the pocket (completely fired, empty, and with punched primer). But TSA had a minor meltdown - they pulled me out of line, did a pat-down, and got a sheriff standing there there involved...
Yep. Something just over a year after, I was going through Boston, returning home from a business trip. My keyring included the .280 Rem case I shot my first buck with many years before. It was tarnished, even slightly dented around the neck from wear and tear over the years, and there was a tiny ring eye screwed in the primer hole to hang it on the key ring. Mind, I’d flown with it before and had just flown up from FL two days prior with it. As my stuff was going through the scanner, the operator gets all animated, calls over the shift supervisor. That guy gets all authoritarian and demands to know whose keys these are. I acknowledged and he starts acting like I’m trying to slip a weapon through capable of taking out the entire terminal. Police officer and another TSA come over. New TSA turned out to be recently retired military. Supervisor accusingly asks why I was carrying it, so I told him. Sentimental value, pleasant memory with my dad, etc. I asked him what the problem was and he lost his sh-t. I explained the obvious, and asked again what the problem was. He started turning shades of red I hadn’t seen yet. The police officer kind of stepped back with a roll of his eyes and the other TSA picked up my key ring and made a show of examining the case, then pronounced it harmless and inert and said it wasn’t a weapon of any kind. That got him a scolding whereupon he was instructed to confiscate it and the supervisor walked away, swaggering like he’d averted something terrible.
The sympathetic TSA removed the case from my key ring and motioned me down to the end of the line and quietly told me to write down my address on a slip of paper. He pocketed the slip of paper and I got my case back about a week later.
None of that surprises most of us, given the idiocy among those ignorant about firearms and related items in the 20+ years since. At the time, I was startled to being shocked.
The case is now on a shelf in my den, no longer on my key ring.
