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The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has been busy so far in 2024 at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS). To date, the agency has found 11 guns before they were brought onboard at the Texas airport.
On January 21st, the TSA found four loaded guns in a single day. This represents 36% of the total found this year. In each case, the local police were called to handle the situation. These four passengers will each face stiff penalties of up to $15,000 each and have their TSA PreCheck® eligibility revoked for at least five years. It should come as no surprise, but passengers are only allowed to travel with firearms inside of checked, hard-sided locked cases. These locked cases must be declared at the airport when a passenger checks in.
Gilbert Almaraz, the TSA’s Federal Security Director for Central Texas, said:
It is disappointing that four separate individuals arrived at the checkpoint with a loaded gun, which introduced a potentially dangerous situation that they brought upon themselves and other travelers.”
As I wrote about a few weeks ago, the TSA found a total of 6,737 firearms at airport security checkpoints in 2023 (around 93% were loaded). This represents the highest total in the agency’s history and averages at 18 per day. Firearms were found in 265 airports and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) had the highest total. More than 858 million passengers were screened last year, which means the agency intercepted 7.8 firearms per million passengers. This represents a drop from the 8.6 per million passengers seen in 2022.
Anthony’s Take: Leave the guns at home or properly check them into your checked bags (following TSA protocols). Kudos to the TSA for finding all of these firearms (some naysayers might wonder how many slipped through, but it’s good knowing this many were found).
(Image Credit: TSA.)
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Advertiser & Editorial Disclosure: The Bulkhead Seat earns an affiliate commission for anyone approved through the links above This compensation may impact how and where links appear on this site. We work to provide the best publicly available offers to our readers. We frequently update them, but this site does not include all available offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities.
2 comments
The penalties are woefully insufficient to deter people from doing this. Beyond the insane level of gun ownership in the United States there’s a reason that stuff like this only happens here: people wouldn’t dare try to carry a gun onto a flight anywhere else. Can you imagine what would happen if you tried that in Peru or Thailand or Israel? Institute similar laws here and you’ll drop the incidences by 90% in a few months.
I’m sorry, but based on image, looks like ATL had the highest total.