Aiport TSA finding guns at twice the rate as 2019

boing
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The are dumped into the same trash bins that all the super dangerous bottles of water over 3 ounces are dumped.

/s

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The really interesting statistic here would be the number of guns that passengers bring along and that the TSA doesn’t find.

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You can’t really know an unknown like that.

Given the metal detectors and scanner, I bet it is very low. It would be hard to sneak it on being a hunk of metal and all.

There might be more thrown into check bags that aren’t declared. I suspect they check those not as thoroughly.

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You don’t say. That’s why it is a hypothetical. We obviously can’t know the real number, but we can send people with guns through airport security and check how many of the guns make it through. That gives us a ballpark estimate of how accurate the screening procedures are in practice.

For example, in 2017, an article in Forbes claimed that during tests, the TSA missed 70% of the weapons carried through airport security checkpoints by undercover investigators of the DHS’s Office of the Inspector General, although this included not just guns but also knives and fake explosives. This was made out as a big improvement over earlier tests where 95% of contraband weapons were missed. Still, not exactly stellar performance on the part of the security screeners. I personally wouldn’t want to bet that the number of missed weapons is “very low”.

IOW, if the approximately 3000 firearms found by the TSA in 2020 represent the 30% of non-missed firearms during tests (assuming for simplicity that during the tests the TSA missed 70% of handguns, 70% of knives etc., which may or may not be actually true), we can extrapolate that around 7000 firearms were carried onto flights with nobody being the wiser. It’s probably just as well that most of these seem to be weapons that law-enforcement officials and other upstanding citizens forgot they had, rather than weapons maliciously smuggled in by terrorists. (For one, there aren’t enough terrorists to go around.)

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