The shooting at the Atlanta airport
This week at the Atlanta airport, a gun went off at the TSA checkpoint, shutting things down for a couple hours. The TSA found a handgun in a traveler’s bag, who then grabbed it and ran away. It accidentally went off as he grabbed it.
The TSA frequently finds guns in bags, thousands per year. On average, they find one per day at the Atlanta airport. Many find this inconceivable, so I thought I’d write up some notes.
It’s accidental. It’s not the case that the TSA is warding off a flood of hijacking attempts, catching people trying to get guns on planes. Instead, it’s accidental. People put guns in their carry-on bags without realizing it. The TSA finds lots of interesting stuff, including a lot of hand grenades, and it’s definitely not on purpose.
It’s not actually often. The rate last year was a gun for around 10 per million screenings. This is about the same rate as traffic accidents. Statistically, on the drive to the airport, you have a 7-in-a-million chance of getting into a car accident. It’s just that with billions of passenger screenings, you’ll get thousands of accidental guns, so it looks often.
Gun ownership in America is roughly 40% owning a gun, and 6% having a concealed carry permit, though many states don’t require one. A study says 3% of Americans routinely carry a hand gun.
A lot of guns are carried by troops. The U.S. military moves its people around the country and around the world with commercial flights. This results in oddities, such as a passenger carrying a rocket launcher. To be fair, rocket launchers are themselves harmless, just a tube and a switch. If you want to blow up a plane with a rocket, a launcher would be of limited help.
The TSA doesn’t catch everything. Regulars frequently test the TSA, and find they fail. The TSA detects things like handguns less than half the time — much less. It’s hard to tell the exact number, because it’s unclear what the testers are doing on purpose that might be different than what passengers are doing accidentally. Anecdotally, I know several people who have accidentally brought guns through security and none who were caught. Other anecdotes hit the news.
Catches are increasing, but given the above discussion, it’s probably because the TSA is getting better rather than a trend toward people carrying more guns.
How could a TSA screener miss guns? I don’t know. But if you have to watch 100,000 bags go by on the belt, I can understand how you might miss one. They have technology that tries to highlight guns, but it’s got issues. I travel with lots of electronics, and I watch on the monitors as they struggle to make sense of it. We imagine a gun will look like what see on TV, lying on its side and easily recognized. In truth, it’ll usually be at an odd angle — guns don’t look like guns when viewed from the top or front, but only when seen from the side. Seen from this angle, the following isn’t instantly recognizable as a gun, when having to distinguish it from all the other pieces of metal a traveler might have in their bag.
What happens if you are caught? I can’t find any good references for this. From what I can find is that it’s an average civil fine of $4000 and that people don’t get convicted of even a misdemeanor criminal offense. You’ll also lose your “TSA precheck” status, and I’m sure you go onto some sort of watchlist for future screenings. I can’t find out if they detain you, allow you to fly, or confiscate your gun.
The point of this post is that all this seems inconceivable. What people understand about TSA checkpoints is built from a series of assumptions, such as nobody carries handguns, that any handguns in bags would be intentional, the TSA easily finds guns, and so on. So many of our assumptions are false.
The larger point for “security” in general is trying to figure out the benefit here. Maybe Schneier’s “security theater” is the benefit. It makes people who might be scared of flying feel more secure. It discourages terrorists in to believing they’ll probably be caught, even if the truth is they probably won’t be.