Tom, you missed a couple of important things.
1. Yes, being a competent firearms instructor who deals with tactical use of firearms DOES qualify you to carry a firearm on a plane. An airplane is no different than any other crowded area in terms of carrying, deploying, or using firearms. The fact that you don’t know that suggests that you’re not familiar with the issue.
2. The pilot you smeared was doing what the TSA requires of ALL FFDO pilots when he fired his weapon. He shouldn’t have been doing it–it’s dangerous, unnecessary, and a clear violation of the rules of gun safety–but it was the TSA bureaucracy that decreed that pilots would not be allowed to fly armed unless they inserted the hasp of a padlock through the trigger guards of loaded weapons at the end of each and every flight.
Again, anyone who understands gun safety should refuse to do that, but it’s not much of a defense of the TSA, since it was their requirement.
In effect, you’ve bolstered Mrs. Jacobsen’s point here by citing another example of the TSA’s passive-aggressive policy of sabotaging the FFDO program. There is no legitimate safety reason for their policy on putting padlocks through trigger guards; Ockham’s Razor suggests that the requirement exists for the purpose of making it cumbersome and annoying to carry a handgun as a pilot–with the unintended consequence that they also managed to make it dangerous.
