Airline travel dive-bombed with the spread of the coronavirus last year, but the numbers of guns found in carry-on baggage at airport security checkpoints was the highest seen in Transportation Security Administration history, the agency said.
Throughout 2020, TSA caught approximately 10 firearms per million passengers screened as compared to about five firearms per million passengers screened in 2019, the agency said.
Yet people traveled by air 60% less than in 2019, the lowest rate since the mid-1980s, Newsweek reported, citing U.S. Bureau of Transportation statistics.
“The vast majority of people who bring guns to checkpoints claim that they forgot that they had their guns with them. Last year, 83 percent of the firearms brought to airports were loaded, so that means people were telling us that they forgot that they had a loaded gun with them,” Lisa Farbstein, a TSA spokeswoman told Newsweek on Thursday.
“If you own a firearm, you need to know where it is at all times.”
The 3,257 total firearms found at checkpoints in 2020 compares with the 4,432 firearms seized in 2019, with 87% of them loaded, the TSA said.
The tally of checkpoint gun seizures is a historic high because around 557 million fewer people flew in 2020 compared with 2019, according to Bureau of Transportation statistics.
TSA regulations allow passengers to bring an unloaded firearm and ammunition on a plane within checked baggage, according to guidelines posted online.
“It was extremely disappointing to see an increase in the number of firearms that travelers brought to the checkpoints in 2020,” Farbstein said.
“Pack it in a hard-sided case. Lock the case. Take the locked case with the unloaded gun to the airline check-in counter and declare that you want to fly with it. The airline will make sure it gets placed in the belly of the plane, never in the cabin of the plane, where someone might have access to it during a flight.”
The airport with the most firearm seizures at checkpoints in 2020 was at Georgia’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, with 220 apprehensions, the TSA reported.
When a firearm is detected by X-ray on a conveyor belt at the airport’s security checkpoint, the TSA immediately calls the police and the weapon is confiscated, Farbstein said. Then the police decide whether the gun’s owner will be arrested, cited or allowed to continue into the airport without the weapon. As for the actual gun, Farbstein said it is up to law enforcement in each jurisdiction to decide how to deal with it.
It remains to be seen how many TSA gun apprehensions at checkpoints will occur in 2021, but the agency has already reported many instances of offenses this year.
On Thursday, TSA officers caught a Cranberry, Pennsylvania, man with a .45-caliber handgun loaded with five bullets at the security checkpoint in Pittsburgh, officials said.
It was the 10th handgun stopped by TSA officers at the airport so far this year.
When the TSA officer spotted the gun in the checkpoint X-ray machine, the Allegheny County Police were alerted, came to the checkpoint, questioned the man and confiscated the gun.
“People who want to travel with their firearms should do some homework so that they know the gun laws in the jurisdictions they are flying to and from,” Farbstein told Newsweek.
Source: Newmax
