Airport security breaches: Why the free pass, media?

Airport security is in the news a lot these days. There's been tremendous outcry over the Transportation Security Administration's full-body scanners and invasive thorough pat-downs, and rightfully so. These new airport security measures raise serious questions about personal privacy, national safety and this document you may have heard of called the Constitution.

But there's a much more serious airport security story that you don't see on the news as much: the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of these airport security measures. Just the other day, a guy in Houston boarded a plane with a loaded Glock in his laptop bag*, and the airport security screeners didn't even notice it. Sure, this story got some play in the press, but the media didn't use it to create a national firestorm like with the TSA peepers and gropers.

Then there's the sad story of Delvonte Tisdale, the North Carolina teenager found dead in Milton, Massachusetts last month. It was all over the local news here in Boston when his body turned up on a quiet suburban street. And the media attention intensified when the district attorney said Tisdale had stowed away in a plane's wheel well and fell to the ground when the landing gear deployed.

But then the story disappeared.

Just to reiterate: A 16-year-old kid managed to bypass airport security, get onto the runway and climb into the wheel well of a commercial airliner. And the collective media response has been, "meh."

These breaches are ginormous problems, and they illustrate a pretty big gap between the perception and reality of airport security. Unfortunately, the mass media has chosen to focus more on the perception.

*Texas really is a whole different world, huh? How the hell could you just "forget" that you left a loaded gun in your laptop bag? And really, why the need to keep a gun in your laptop bag in the first place? Afraid someone's gonna steal your TPS reports?