Worse than useless, actually.  Dangerous.  I’ll get to that in a minute.

Many of you dear readers know that I’m a travel guru and it’s my day job to help wealthy people spend their money on fancy vacations.  In the course of doing that I recently booked all available first class seats on a Virgin America flight from LA to the east coast.  I received a call this morning from Virgin America HQ informing me that for “federal reasons” two of the passengers in our party would be downgraded to economy.  (Airlines are legally obligated not to disclose the fact that air marshals are behind this passenger displacement, but I’ve been in this business long enough to know exactly what’s going on).

This isn’t Virgin’s fault; it happens on all airlines and Virgin did more to re-accommodate us than many others would have.  The blame here lies squarely with the federal government and the worse-than-useless Department of Homeland Security.  Its workfare program to pay people to fly around the globe armed with handguns is a colossal waste of money and is a bigger danger to passengers than any would-be terrorist.  Don’t believe me?  Ask the man they gunned down in Miami.  Or the marshal who left his gun in the lavatory for a surprised passenger to find.  Or the one who threatened to shoot a passenger in an airport lot over a parking space.

Guns should not be allowed on airplanes, period.  Not by passengers, not by pilots, not by law enforcement - no one should have a firearm in that space.  The TSA’s job - ineffective and politicized as it is - is to prevent weapons from entering the “sterile” area.  Those of you who know as much about airport security as I do know that airport concourses are anything but “sterile”, with ID-badged workers constantly coming and going without being screened.  But to intentionally allow anyone to bring a gun on a plane is just plain stupid.  Stop this practice now before someone else gets killed in the hunt for unicorns terrorists.

And while we’re stuck with the marshals on our flights, for fuck’s sake make them fly coach.  The government doesn’t pay for the seats the marshals use, meaning that the feds are stealing revenue from the airlines.  In Virgin’s case these two occupied seats made up 25% of their first class cabin.  This is theft, and it hits Virgin disproportionately hard because their premium cabins only have eight seats.  The marshals can be proximate to the cockpit from the first row of economy.  Greedy bastards.