Former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour Arrested At Airport With A Loaded Gun

AP News- Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said he will pay a fine after being arrested with a loaded handgun in his briefcase as he went through an airport security checkpoint in early January.

Barbour — Republican National Committee chairman in the mid-1990s and governor from 2004-12 — told The Associated Press on Tuesday he was trying to board a flight Jan. 2 from Jackson to Washington, D.C. He said he forgot he was carrying the gun, which he had put in his briefcase after an assistant removed it from his car days earlier.

“This was absentmindedness and nobody’s fault but mine,” said Barbour, 70, who lives in Mississippi and frequently travels to the nation’s capital for his job as a lobbyist.

Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said a TSA officer working at an X-ray machine at a checkpoint at Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport spotted a .38-caliber revolver, loaded with five bullets, in a passenger’s carry-on bag. TSA contacted airport police, who arrested the passenger.

Barbour said the gun was confiscated and he then boarded his flight to Washington.

“Next time, I’ll be more observant about getting stuff out of my briefcase,” he said.

I often forget things when I travel. Usually it’s small items like toothpaste, headphones, or my foldable spork. Similarly, I will forget to take incriminating items out of my bag or pockets. Sometimes it’s a lighter, some garden shears, or a small bag of prescription painkillers and penis enhancers. Assorted knick-knacks and tic-tacs, if you will.

But never in my life have I forgotten to remove a loaded gun from my carry-on. How on earth does this happen? Was it hidden under some socks? I recognize this is a small revolver, but goodness me– how many guns would you have to own where you’d forget that you had one on you at the airport? I know for a fact that if I owned a gun, I’d have a good sense of where it was. After all, what’s the point of owning a gun if you keep misplacing it? I lose sunglasses constantly so I stopped buying expensive sunglasses. It’s gas station shades from here on for this moron. If you can’t remember that you’ve got a gun in your bag at the airport, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to own a gun. I’m not even making a gun control argument; I’m making an Alzheimer’s argument. Haley Barbour’s brain is on the fritz and it should be nerf guns and super soakers for him from now on.

I suppose it’s good the TSA caught him. Good to know those machines actually work, given how fucking annoying it is to take my shoes off and on. Somehow, I bet this story will make Haley Barbour more popular to his former constituency in Mississippi. “We want a gov’ner who fergets he has a gun!”