http://www.thespec.com/News/CanadaWorld/article/377499
Pistol pendant security risk?
Airport has woman put trinket into checked baggage
May 30, 2008
Brett Popplewell
Toronto Star
(May 30, 2008)
The Colt 45 hung cold around her neck, like a pendant.
Because it was a pendant.
On Monday, Marnina Norys was forced to remove a piece of silver jewellery, cast in the shape of an antique pistol, by airport security in Kelowna, B.C., who feared the trinket posed a security risk to the passengers of her WestJet flight.
Approaching the security desk, the 39-year old PhD student of social political thought at York University says she was stunned when guards labelled the five-centimetre long pendant a replica firearm.
"When the woman pointed at the pendant I had no idea what she was talking about," says Norys, who was informed that replica firearms are banned. "They made me feel ashamed, as if I should have known that it was wrong to wear this type of jewellery."
Flustered, Norys stuffed the pendant into her carry-on. Next, a security guard told Norys she'd have to check her jewellery under the plane because of its symbolic importance.
After checking the trinket and arriving back in Toronto, Norys told the creator of the pendant, Calvin Dana Munroe of Toronto's Bad Ass Jewellery, about the incident. He said it was absurd.
Norys has since received an official apology from the Canadian Air Transport Authority for the incident.
"The screening officer involved made a judgment call, rather than refer to the authority's standard operating procedures," Dave Smith, director of screening operations with CATSA, wrote in a letter to Norys. "In retrospect, your revolver-shaped pendant is not a threat and should have been allowed on-board the aircraft."
Norys isn't satisfied with the explanation.
"The problem wasn't that she didn't follow operating procedures. It's that she didn't use her judgment at all."