To be honest I've never seen one of those tags either. That said, I've never transported a gun.
Honestly, he's strangely right on this one. And TSA isn't even allowed to open it after you lock it.
There's a well known security expert who documents that he travels with some VERY expensive gear for business. His cases are made in such a way that you can NOT get them open without destroying them.
He puts a cheap .22 in every case and checks them in that way, anywhere he can travel where he can legally have unloaded handguns in his possession at the far end.
He's seen prybar marks where overzealous TSA folks have tried to open the cases anyway. None have gotten into them.
Perhaps appropriately, he works as a security expert for a living. He figures what's in his luggage is nobody's business once TSA has looked at it once with him standing there, as required by law.
He started doing it after stuff got stolen. Of course the airline blamed it on TSA and TSA blamed it on the airline, so he decided to figure out how to legally lock up his luggage in such a way as to see to it that nobody else other than him was allowed to open it by law.
He points out that his cases are now more secure than they're allowed to be if shipped as cargo. Which was often what he did before this if he didn't have to be somewhere for a few days. Ship to the hotel.
Now unless he needs a TON of stuff, he doesn't bother. Checking two overweight cases with firearms in them is more efficient.
In a few cities (and he can name them) TSA hates that they can't open them when they're out of his presence. They try anyway. And fail. He also knows the cases have never been replaced with duplicates. I won't go into how he knows that, but it's a surefire thing.
(He also knows how to keep those pistols quite secure at the far end also. It's what he does... he's not using the firearms for anything else other than to keep people out of his travel cases.)
And of course there's a few places where he can't travel there with the firearms. Most of those aren't that great a distance from another airport where he can, and the few times a year he goes to those cities he lands at a different airport, gets a rental car, and drops the firearms off for "deep cleaning" at a gun shop in friendly territory.
In other words, the pistols go to the spa for however many days he's there. They don't need cleaning and the store never bothers, but most stores don't advertise that they'll lock your firearms up for you for a week or less as a service. But almost all good shops have a gunsmith and they'll of course lock firearms up while they're in for "service". Not hard to find one that will.
He hasn't had anything stolen since that first incident.
He says it adds about half an hour to his trip unless he has to do the "swing by the gun store for cleaning" crap. He charges more for those trips, so for him, it's a wash other than an extra hour or two of time.
