You don’t need to explode a barrel of fuel around the corner or pay an escort to play temptress in order to catch security personnel off guard. There’s a much simpler way; bring along a wheelchair-bound acquaintance.
I went to a baseball game the other night with visiting family. One of the visitors is elderly and unable to walk very far. We take him in a wheelchair whenever we go on anything but the most trivial outings…such as attending a baseball game in a large arena. Well most arenas ban pretty much anything: food, drink, motion photography, pets, laser pointers, offensively-sloganed apparel, noise makers, and weapons.
Hmmmm. Weapons? Check! Gots me a knife. Gots me a gun.
The fact of the matter, redneck joking aside, is that I do very regularly carry a knife and a handgun as self-defense tools. And I generally carry them everywhere it’s not illegal to do so. In my state, organizations can post signs saying that they don’t want people to carry weapons. But failure to ignore those signs is not a crime. It’s only a crime if you are asked to leave while carrying said weapons and then you fail to comply. In these cases, concealed means concealed and what they don’t know won’t become an issue.
I really try not to patronize establishments that feel I should disarm because the mere posession of a tool of self-defense might lead me to, against my own will to be a good person, wreak havoc and harm upon others. But sadly, most large-venue events these days have signs or ticket policies saying, “Thou Shalt Disarm!” It’s just a forgone conclusion of the event coordinators that weapons = bad.
So many others like me go to these events armed, yet a little more well concealed. We look for ways to game security. Are they wanding? Are they wanding everyone? Are there pat downs? Are they just “profiling?” What are they really looking for? Do they get more lax during busy times?
I won’t give away any answers/secrets. But it’s pretty hard for most security forces at public events to do their jobs. They don’t have x-ray vision. They don’t have infinite time to deal with each customer passing by. They have a lot of things to look for. They’re rarely are equipped with metal detection tools (which consequently would produce too many false positives at large events). Basically, they’re looking for the needle in a haystack. And in many events, such as ball games where there are numerous people who may be intoxicated from tailgating activities, there isn’t a narrowly defined norm against which they can profile people. Basically, if a weapons carrier can act reasonably normal, he is not going to have trouble getting past security.
Admittedly, there’s a lot of what-if’ing going on in that preceding paragraph that makes going armed to such events rather tedious. But I have found a much, much, much easier way about it:
Take a feeble-looking, preferably elderly person, with you and enjoy virtually skirting any and all security measures.
This won’t exactly get you past TSA security (well maybe it might), but in less-secure environments, handicapped clientele really have an advantage. Why? Well, security personnel do a very routine task. Introducing them with a person in a wheelchair diverts them from their normal task of checking for issues to one of helping someone in need.
In fact, at this ball game that I went to, my 90 year old relative plus 6 other able-bodied people were directed to a special wheelchair accessible entrance by a staff member who, in her effort to help, neglected to check any of the four large-ish bags we had with us (not that they were even checking our persons for concealed contraband). Perhaps she just thought we looked trustworthy. More likely, we interrupted normal mental operations with something out of the ordinary and she forgot to do her job as she was trained.
No loss for us….this time or the other numerous times this has happened.
