Officials at Logan International Airport encountered a rarely seen covert firearm this weekend, the agency said on social media, when a gun made to resemble a pen was found by Transportation Security Administration officers.
“@TSA officers @BostonLogan detected this .22 caliber single shot firearm Saturday afternoon,” the federal security agency’s New England branch tweeted Sunday.
Recovered Saturday was a Braverman Stinger, a folding small caliber pistol manufactured in the mid-90s to skirt the federal firearms laws governing other types of novelty guns.
It is, as far as the federal government is concerned, not too much different from any other handgun. The weapon can be chambered in several calibers, including .22 LR, .22 Magnum, and .25, .32, and .380 ACP rounds.
The single-shot firearm is capable of causing lethal harm, but is generally seen as nothing more than a novelty since the lack of a sighting system and the weapon’s very short barrel make them inaccurate even at short ranges.
The pen guns are not legal in Massachusetts, falling outside the General Law’s legal definition of a firearm which excludes “covert weapons that resemble key-chains, pens, cigarette-lighters or cigarette packages.”
TSA at Logan Airport has recovered more than a dozen weapons so far this year, the agency said.
“This was the 17th firearm detected at a BOS security checkpoint,” they tweeted.
Passengers can fly with firearms, but they must be declared and checked in a locked container without any ammunition, according to the TSA.
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