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The U.S. Senate has agreed that Amtrak must allow guns to be carried in checked baggage.

It might be a Second Amendment thing but it’s mostly an unfunded mandate.

Amtrak banned firearms from its trains in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the sponsor of the Amtrak gun language added to the transportation and housing appropriations measure currently before Congress, argued that all domestic airlines permit firearms in checked luggage and Amtrak should do the same.

The guns on the rails amendment received bipartisan support, but isn’t included in the House version so there is still time to take sides.

Amtrak, cash strapped and short on both political and popular support, is protesting that setting up a gun check-in as required will be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.

On the Senate floor this week Wicker said Amtrak was preventing free exerccise of the Second Amendment by denying the right to carry firearms in locked, hard-side cases in checked baggage.

The more pure Second Amendment claim would be that passengers should be allowed to fire at railroad crossing signs from moving trains. Otherwise, what’s a free state all about?

1. Boyd Lewis says:

   September 20, 2009 at 10:48 pm

   My Second Amendment sensibilities are indeed offended by Amtrak segregating firearms and even crew-served weaponry to checked baggage in the car back behind the dining car. Like some of our enlightened states, I demand open carrying of firearms. Why, the Second Amendment guaranteeing flintlocks for a regulated citizen militia to defend us from marauding British or Canadian (shudder) soldiers on our soil in no way forbids my carrying aboard a vintage Schmeisser MP43 anywhere in public, so I may plink Lyndon Larouche supporters with their Obama=Hitler posters with gay abandon. You can get my machinenpistolen when you pry it from my cold, dead, chaffed, splintered-fingernailed, calloused hands. Feh!

   Reply
2. C Smith says:

   September 21, 2009 at 10:38 am

   Do you think if our Presidents, Senate, Congress, and Supreme Court had kept our Constitution up to date over the last 200 years instead of trying to change it all at once might have averted todays confrontations.

   Reply
3. C Smith says:

   September 21, 2009 at 10:51 am

   Punctuation should have been ? just in case the grammar police are out.

   Reply
4. Brenden says:

   September 21, 2009 at 12:59 pm

   Why not stop funding this ridiculous anti-competitive failed enterprise and end the debate. Oh, that’s right: because everyone’s a racist. I always forget about that…

   Reply