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Comment by rflrob | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately, not all customs officers are this bad. About a year ago, I spent a couple months traveling around the Mediterranean, including Syria and Lebanon. Upon my return to the states, I got some moderately thorough questioning, but nothing that required a separate interrogation room, and the officer was polite the whole time.

On the other hand, I didn't have a bullet in my pants. TSA says: "You must securely pack any ammunition in fiber (such as cardboard), wood or metal boxes or other packaging that is specifically designed to carry small amounts of ammunition." (http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/assistant/editorial_1...)

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Most countries allow you to have multiple passports - it's useful when you have lots of business trips that need visas to 3rd world countries that take 6weeks to process the visa.

I work in mining and in the bad-old-days we used to have to keep multiple passports, to keep SAfrican, Isreali, Chilean etc entry stamps separate.

Now I tend to keep one passports just for the USA - it's easier than explaining to the TSA that visiting a country that doesn't speak English (like Jesus did) doesn't make one a terrorist.

Ironically the only problem I have had is that after being forced to get a brand new passport because the USA demanded RFID - I was questioned for 30mins on my lack of travel history!

Sorry can't reply to your post for some reason.

I'm not american but have multiple copies of my own country's passport. I keep one 'clean' by not using it when I visit terrorist countries - ie cuba and anywhere that uses squiggly writing - and enter america on that one.

In the 70s and 80s it was trickier. If you had an Isreali entry stamp you couldn't go to any arabic country. I was even refused entry to Egypt once because some Egyptian immigration moron (they aren't all American) thought my Nepali trekking permit was Hebrew.

Similalry if you had a S African stamp you couldn't visit most african countries or anywhere describing itself as the 'democratic republic of'

South america was in theory tricky since every little tin pot dictator was always against every other little tin pot dictator but in practice their immigration was never organised enough to stop you

How does this work? Do you have multiple US passports? Or passports from multiple countries? Doesn't the US care and couldn't you get in trouble for having passports from other countries and not disclosing them?

I don't fully understand how he made it to Customs without someone catching the ammunition earlier.

I can't recall a travel experience where I went through Customs before going through security first. As Customs occurs at port of entry, I assume he would have passed through security in Delhi. I suppose security could have been lax or complacent there, but it still seems an odd thing to have made it through a scanner first.

My belt buckle has much more metal than a shell casing, and it never sets off the metal detectors at airports. Shell casings have less metal in them than the buttons on my button-fly jeans.

EDIT: I was mistaken, he did say it was an unused bullet, so it was more than a shell casing.

Yeah, that's a good point. I was thinking more along the lines of an X-ray machine (see, I don't even know enough about security processes to know if that's the right terminology) where they reveal outlines of denser objects, rather than the pass-through metal detector itself.

He actually says "bullet", I would interpret that literally - just the bullet, not a full shell and definitely not any gunpowder.

Virtually everyone I know would call a "cartridge" a "bullet", just as they might confuse "clip" and "magazine".

Educate me - what's the difference between a cartridge and a bullet? What's the difference between a clip and a magazine?

Edit: found answer to my first question below. The bullet is the inert mass. The cartridge is a bullet plus casing plus gunpowder / other energetic material.

Clip vs. magazine: http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2009/02/21/clip-vs-magazi...

Huh. So a clip is a bunch of cartridges with something connecting them, whereas a magazine is an enclosed box of cartridges.

Or at least, that's what I got out of the link. That one is (still) legitimately confusing to me. It didn't directly help (I didn't notice what was strange / funny about the image until I followed through to the "Gun Zone" link).

That's possible; if so, the word "unused" threw me off. But your interpretation could also be right too.

It appears that it was in the pants, which were in the bag. Bag could be checked in and go though different check entirely.

This occurred immediately after his passport was stamped, indicating that it actually took place at immigration, not customs. (At almost all airports, you go through baggage claim after immigration (but before customs, obviously).

So the bullet was probably carried on, and thus went through security, but small items like this are missed all the time in the x-ray scanner.

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