Stun Guns Get Through TSA — Why Are Liquids Still Restricted?

Three times. A colleague inadvertently traveled with her stun gun in her laptop bag on a flight three times in 2025, without being stopped by TSA once.

She keeps the personal protection device with her when she commutes in and out of New York via the Port Authority — a dingy bus terminal where travelers are wise to remain vigilant — but occasionally forgets to remove it before heading to the airport. One such occasion was a round-trip flight between JFK and San Juan, a terrible two-fer in which neither airport’s security seemed to detect nor mind the stun gun. The third accident missed by the TSA was on a domestic flight from New York to North Carolina. I joined my friend on the San Juan trip, and watched it all unfold with a mix of glee and horror.

You may be thinking to yourself, okay it’s not great the TSA missed her stun gun three times, but in fairness, those devices are designed these days to be discrete, and come semi-disguised as everyday items. Well, not so much. Close your eyes and imagine what a stun gun would look like before you click the forthcoming link. Enter the Sabre Stun Gun S-1005. Yup, there it is. That’s a stun gun. My friend’s stun gun. I’m pretty confident that if I worked in airport security, I would flag it. Sure seems suspicious to me. Worth a closer inspection, at least.

There’s an entire section of TSA’s posted online regulations devoted to “stun guns/shocking devices” outlining that they’re not allowed in carry-on bags, and must be transported in checked luggage in a way that renders them “inoperable from accidental discharge.” I reached out to the TSA to reconcile that policy with my friend’s three flights packing electro heat. A response took a while, owing to the government shutdown, but the agency did reply, asking me if there were more specifics about the incidents I could provide so they could look them up. But there weren’t any reported incidents. They missed the stun gun, every time, so there were no reports. That’s the point.

Arbitrary Inconsistency the State of the TSA Game

While TSA touts their ability to thwart would-be violators, whether of the benign and forgetful or of the bad intentions variety — disclosing for instance that they detected 6,737 firearms in 2023, or 7.8 per million passengers of the total 858 million screened that year — it begs the question: How many violations are missed? There are rampant stories over the years of passengers making it past security with weapons, and now that I’ve seen firsthand their blind spot for stun guns, it makes me wonder what else could be sneaking through.

Yet, if I dare to have a tube of toothpaste outside of my allotted clear plastic bag of liquids, I know for damn sure those fine folks at TSA are pulling me aside into the secondary screening line of shame, where other passengers will pass judgment upon me while peering into my bag to see just what it is I’ve got in there. On the very same security line that my colleague made it through with her stun gun, my shoulder exerciser — the one from the commercials, with a ball clipped to the end of a nylon rope affixed to a handle that you hold out and rotate — required further inspection, multiple agents’ assessments and managerial input.

Travelers around the country rejoiced early last year when TSA announced it was ending the requirement of non-TSA PreCheck passengers taking off their shoes. Or maybe we all incredulously guffawed that the shoe check was still a thing. After all, as Key & Peele elucidated in their Al Qaeda Meeting sketch of failed hijackers reconvening for a debrief about what went wrong, “you don’t even know, it is all because the cunning and mighty TSA is always one step ahead of us.” Those tortured would-be terrorists had a plot with five-inch scissors sussed out, but “how could they know that a five-inch blade is a dangerous weapon and a four-inch blade is no more than a child’s play thing?”

“That is the genius of TSA! They foil us at every turn! Devils!”

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While certain TSA processes are being streamlined and new technology is being introduced, other comically wacky ones remain in place. Is it safety that’s at the heart of this, or just inane bureaucracy? I wonder.

In JFK’s terminal 4, when you’re in a security line with one of the newer scanners, the kind that look more like MRI machines for your bags, only one large electronic device is allowed in your bag. A camera and a laptop in one backpack break the thing, apparently. Although, only when one of the officers decides to care. I travel with multiple electronic devices in my carry on. I’ve had my bag searched, and I’ve had it gone through unimpeded — in the same exact line. Same terminal, same line, same machine, different days, different times, different outcomes. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason behind it.

It’s consistent inconsistency as a modus operandi. I know I don’t feel any safer. But it is more difficult for me to exercise my rotator cuff because that darn jump rope thingamajiggy in my bag always gets scrutinized to the point of exhaustion.

Stun guns, though? Right on through. Have a safe flight.