redmage311

All the time. One guy forgot that he had left his pistol in his bag and ended up going to jail for 6 months or so.

I once had a request for private screening, which we usually took to mean that we were about to see something weird. The bag was incredibly heavy.

After we go behind a curtained-off area, the passengers show me 6 blocks of mixed metal, 4 huge bags of random pieces of gold, and 2 bags of human teeth. Apparently, the couple made a killing off of buying teeth from a crematorium, melting out the fillings, and selling the resulting metal.

It smelled bad.

Somebody took a golf club through the checkpoint and said it was their cane. We weren't allowed to question him.

My wife bought a stupidly overpriced Kirby from a door-to-door salesman a few years ago. It generally smells like burning.

Depends on what you mean by random. Without going into detail, random checks at the checkpoint usually actually are random (e.g., the equipment prompts a random check). Keep in mind that the average TSO is extremely lazy and has other things to do. The last thing they generally want to do is go through your things or whatever.

However, being extremely nervous may prompt additional search from the behavior detection officers (the people whose job it is to stare at everybody). See here for a better explanation.