I've been following this thread for some time. Is it just me or are we missing the bigger issue here.

This agent would have flown on this flight without the captain reviewing his paperwork at all if he had never left the plane to retrieve something. If you want to point the finger at the agent then do so for being foolish and forgetting something at the gate.

The pilots comments on the carbon copy of the form being unreadable could have been easily resolved had he taken the time to get the original. Instead he chose to interrogate the agent to the point of making him complete the form not once but twice.

Bottom line is this captain erred in not proactively reviewing the forms of an armed passenger on his plane. A captain should know who is armed on his flights and know what they look like before they board the plane. For this captain to only know his armed passengers by a seat # is unacceptable. What if they booked the same seat to another passenger and the agent volunteered to take any empty seat somewhere else on the plane. It is really unfortunate that only when he realized that his armed passenger was the same one the FA “profiled” did he even get involved.