David Huckabee, a son of Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, was arrested at an Arkansas airport Thursday after a federal X-ray technician detected a loaded Glock pistol in his carry-on luggage.

"I removed the bag and asked Mr. Huckabee if he knew what he had in the bag," Little Rock police officer Arthur Nugent wrote in a report after being summoned to a security checkpoint. "He replied he did now."

Huckabee, 26, later pleaded guilty in Little Rock District Court after being charged with a misdemeanor count of possessing a weapon in a prohibited place.

"It was a silly mistake," Huckabee told reporters as he left the Pulaski County Jail. When asked whether it would affect his father's presidential campaign, Huckabee responded, "It shouldn't."

District Judge Lee Munson gave Huckabee a one-year suspended jail sentence and ordered him into 10 days of community service — which Huckabee can avoid by paying $100. Huckabee will be on probation for a year. Fines and costs totaled $855.

The son of the former Arkansas governor held a concealed weapons permit at the time of the incident but state police are taking steps to revoke it. The elder Huckabee, who said last week that Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho perhaps could have been stopped if a teacher or student had also been armed, also has a concealed weapons permit.

"My wife and I love our son. What he did was irresponsible but not intentional," Mike Huckabee said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Nugent said David Huckabee had a .40-caliber Glock pistol in his black carry-on bag. Eight live rounds were in the gun — none in the chamber — and a nine-round clip was also in the bag. The weapon and ammunition were detained by Little Rock police while David Huckabee's gun permit was seized and given to the Arkansas State Police.

Mike Huckabee said his son grabbed the bag on the way to the airport and didn't realize the gun was inside.

"It's one of those stupid things," Mike Huckabee said. "He knows better."

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Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney likened Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Adolf Hitler in a speech on Thursday to Jewish university students.

Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a myth and said that Israel should be "wiped off the map."

"We are faced with the horrific proposition that those who speak of genocide are developing the capability to carry it out," Romney, referring to the Islamic jihad movement, said in a dinner speech for the business school of Yeshiva University.

The former Massachusetts governor said Iran and its leader are threats to Israel and that Ahmadinejad has "gone beyond the boundary of outrage."

"His purpose is not only to deny the Holocaust; it is to deny Israel," Romney said. "He is doing as another evil man did before him: conditioning minds to acquiesce to the elimination of a nation."

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press

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