Oberoni

I've been to court with them over this. TSA screening manager threatening me with being put on the no-fly list if I didn't commit a felony by giving him my keys so he could inspect my bag without me present.

No they aren't. When flying with a firearm they are not allowed to inspect the bag without the owner present.

eCFR Guidelines

The container in which it is carried is locked, and only the passenger retains the key or combination.

If they take my keys and walk away behind closed doors where I cannot see what they are doing I am not retaining my keys.

At many airports they take you to a special screening area and scan your bag in front of you so if they need to see inside you can unlock it, step back, and watch them do the inspection before locking the the bag back up. I have no problem doing that. I do have a problem with letting someone I don't know compromise the security of my bag and have access to my firearms.

In the case of NFA items(like the suppressors mentioned above) it's because the ATF is a horribly run agency. You can send in three forms for 3 different suppressors, put them in the same envelope, and have months between each one getting approved. There are a lot of people who think most of the NFA form reviewers are actually anti-gun and it's hard to argue they aren't with things like some reviewers outputting more than 3 or 4 other reviewers.

The bigger point however is that the NFA and its subsequent reviews are seen as a way to make it such a pain in the ass/so expensive that no one bothers. Suppressors are not mechanically complicated, neither are SBRs or SBSs, but because they require a 200$ tax stamp and months and months of waiting + restrictions on transporting them the price is artificially high. It's the same reason when NICS was implemented they had to add in a 3 day limit to Allow/Deny the sale before it just becomes a default Allow. Without it the ATF could effectively ban guns by just not doing any of the paperwork.

The ATF even had a website for a while that only let people with a Trust put their paperwork in. So people of course got trusts to submit their paperwork. That site went down for 'maintenance' every Wednesday during normal working hours(Name 1 online retailer that needs to do this). Then because so many people were using trusts 41F went through because of a made up edge case involving trusts, the ATF literally refused to show it was a problem, and they closed the website to the public entirely. It was just a big "Fuck you" to gun owners.

Requiring CCW instructors to take a federal course is just the first step in further "Fuck yous". People like to make fun of gun owners and mockingly say, "Thar comin' tuh take muh guns!", but there is good reason for us to be skeptical. There are politicians, even ones currently sitting in office, that have said they would take them all if they could. The additional "Fuck yous" over the years haven't helped gain any trust either.

They now have signs with those rules on them in most airports. Put up by the TSA themselves and they still can't follow them.

Makes you wonder what all was going onto planes before without any issues.