We can turn any ordinary household object into a deadly weapon. Maybe Homeland Security should put all educators on their "no-fly" list. They did catch one of us.

It wasn't a gun or a knife. It was a weighted bookmark.
Kathryn Harrington was flying home from vacation last month when screeners at the Tampa, Fla., airport found her bookmark. It's an 8.5-inch leather strip with small lead weights at each end.

Oooooh. That's a potent tool for assassination. And you should see what a teacher can do with a red felt-tip pen, or those sticker sheets of gold stars. It isn't pretty.

Now, of course, what do you think airport security would do to someone who tried to carry such an implement of destruction onto a plane? Confiscate it? Not in swaggering, red-meat America, you don't.

Airport police said it resembled a weighted weapon that could be used to knock people unconscious. So the 52-year-old special education teacher was handcuffed, put into a police car, and charged with carrying a concealed weapon.

One of our defenses is our apparent innocence. What an act.

"I pretty much cried throughout the whole thing," said Harrington, a Sunday school teacher with a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University.

Crying, Sunday-school-teaching, and a fancy-pants degree—fear her cunning strategems. You know that once she gets out she's going to callously menace society with her pocket comb or a book of poetry.

According to the TSA's official prohibited items list, anyone who brings any banned item to a screening checkpoint, even accidentally, may be criminally or civilly prosecuted. Even items that are not specifically listed, but could be considered dangerous, are illegal.

So now we let the underpaid, unqualified, uneducated people who get hired to man security checkpoints have the discretion to throw people in jail because they carry some unspecified item they think might be dangerous? Man, what a clever scheme for locking up the intelligentsia.

Don't tell anyone, but I travel with a laptop and various items associated with it. Did you know you can use a USB cable as a garrote, that you can look up explosives recipes on the intarweb with one of those thingies, and that if you sharpen the edges of your CDs you can fling them at people and decapitate them?