Originally Posted by
Often1
The rules governing on-duty employee job conduct are employing agency work rules. Same as uniform, how many breaks you get, and all kinds of other stuff. They also generally specify what you can and cannot carry for personal items. This could include personal cell phones, firearms, and whether you can chew gum.
The real reason underlying all of this has little to do with firearms and everything to do with compensation. Federal laws and OPM rules dealing with employees who perform law enforcement functions (having nothing to do with their title) are entitled to certain pay scales, better retirement and other benefits as the result of their LEO status. Those rules definite what consitutes a "law enforcement officer" and one of the key indicators is that the individual is authoirzed or required to carry a firearm on duty.
That's a load.
The "real reason underlying all of this" is that TSOs are NOT law enforcement and do NOT carry out law enforcement functions. It has nothing to do with whether or not the gubment wants to compensate them for being Big Men With Guns - it has to do with the whole reason for being of their agency, which is
security screening, NOT law enforcement. There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any reason whatsoever for airport security screeners, whether government or private contractors, to be armed or to have any sort of law enforcement powers, because they have
no law enforcement responsibilities. They're civilian screeners. That's all, nothing else.
And therein lies the biggest, most pervasive problem with the entire agency - John Pistole comes from an FBI background. He's a law enforcement professional whose entire carreer was built upon the search for and apprehension of criminals. Yet he's been given directorship of a federal agency which has no such mandate, responsibility, or authority, and he has been attempting to turn that agency into a law enforcement agency because the administrative search doctrine allows TSA to avoid pesky little annoyances like "civil rights" and "the Constitution" when they search people en masse.
The end result of this is that we now have an agency of 65,000 civilian screeners with no law enforcement responsibilities, powers, or authorities, who wear paramilitary uniforms and badges, and whose official job titles include the word "officer", who have been brainwashed into thinking that they are part of the "think blue line" that protects us all from the evils of drug smugglers and non-custodial kidnappers and people carrying too much money. They think they're cops.
As on so many other topics, they think wrong.