Ex-Mississippi Gov. Barbour arrested with gun at airport
JACKSON, Miss. — Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said he will pay a fine after being arrested with a loaded handgun in his briefcase as he went through an airport security checkpoint in early January.
Barbour — Republican National Committee chairman in the mid-1990s and governor from 2004-12 — told The Associated Press on Tuesday he was trying to board a flight Jan. 2 from Jackson to Washington, D.C. He said he forgot he was carrying the gun, which he had put in his briefcase after an assistant removed it from his car days earlier.
“This was absentmindedness and nobody’s fault but mine,” said Barbour, 70, who lives in Mississippi and frequently travels to the nation’s capital for his job as a lobbyist.
Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said a TSA officer working at an X-ray machine at a checkpoint at Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport spotted a .38-calibre revolver, loaded with five bullets, in a passenger’s carry-on bag. TSA contacted airport police, who arrested the passenger.