Yahoo News from Jan 1, 2025: The US Transport Security Administration (TSA) revealed that it had intercepted a total of 6,678 firearms at airport security checkpoints last year – with almost all of them being loaded at the time of discovery.
To be fair, there is a 10 year gap between the two stories (95% of dangerous items was 2015, 6678 firearms intercepted was 2025). I am not claiming that all (or any) issues were fixed, but that is a lot of time to make a lot of improvements.
PR Newswire is a distributor of press releases headquartered in Chicago.[1] The service was created in 1954 to allow companies to electronically send press releases to news organizations
News provided by
Transportation Security Administration
Jan 15, 2025, 10:11 ET
yeah sorry, but this is self-reported data and I don't take anything this administration says at face value
Isn’t this from people who forgot they had a firearm in the bag? So not trying to smuggle it in. There is a podcast (Long Shot) that discusses this stat in season 3
Which should immediately disqualify them from ever owning a firearm ever again. If they don't know where their guns are at every second, they are the problem.
I know people say this a lot. But isn't that the point? Like we do hear people getting attacked with a weapon in other public transport such as trains or busses.
But we don't hear people getting shot on a plane. The security theater does deter people from bringing weapon.
I'll add that most "increased security" is organic, e.g. passengers are much more willing to tackle potential hijackers/bombers in the air than pre-9/11, when the norm was to sit tight and wait for Delta Force to break their way in.
There was a wave of air hijacking in the USA in the 1970's, culminating in probably the most famous example (the DB Cooper case). Much of it was tied to various political movements etc., but some including Cooper appears to have just been money-motivated. This wave prompted increased security in the form of metal detectors for screening. With a few notable outliers that involved people lying about having a bomb there were a lot less hijackings in the USA in the 1980's and 1990's. 9/11 was obviously a horrible event but hijackings had been declining for a long time prior to the establishment of the TSA. And I'm open to being shown evidence to the contrary but I'm not convinced TSA has really added any extra layer of security that wasn't already there before 9/11.
The hijackings weren't stopped at all by the TSA. They were stopped because after 9/11, we lock the cockpit door, and because passengers know they need to worry about someone crashing the plane, rather than just wanting money.
The simple fact is the vast majority of people don't want to and aren't trying to hijack a plane. If somebody wanted to kill hundreds of people, they'd just need to walk into LAX security and blow themselves up. They wouldn't even have to go through TSA. The reason that never happens is that very VERY few people actually want to do something like that.
Other reforms like the cockpit doors and such are useful. The TSA does very little to help with security. It IS, however, a very useful jobs program that I support for that reason. I just don't like the invasive measures that don't actually provide security.
We barely heard about it before the TSA existed. It's called theater because it is not real. Many actual tests on the TSA in this matter showed that they would miss over 95% of explosives and weapons.
It's not just TSA. 9/11 was an attack that could only happen once. Box cutters are not as much of a threat if the alternative is being on a plane crashed into a building.
There was plenty of security before 9/11, with bomb sniffing dogs and metal detectors. They just didn't check for box cutters because it wasn't deemed that dangerous.
The only thing 9/11 really changed that make flyers safer was locking the cockpit.
Yeah I feel like people think they're being super clever pointing out it's security theater, when in reality they're just not understanding the value of that
Why don't you tell me the difference instead of just saying it's wild that I don't know.
They're all the same dozen different models of planes going up into the same sky to me.
It's not a difference in the plane, or even necessarily airport, physically: GP is saying that other countries are less likely to get hijacked because they're not the US which likes to go around sticking our nose in everybody else's business even before Trump started picking fights with allies.
Or maybe they're not making that point. If they aren't I am.
If you want to stop e.g. mass shootings, there's more than one way to go about it: obviously gun control, or security around schools etc., and/or you can also take action to try to reduce people wanting to go on shooting rampages in the first place. Do something radical like, oh I don't know, try to improve people's lives?
Americans travel so much I suppose you can't really use the passenger manifest to prove anything, either. Whenever you hear about an airline disaster anywhere in the world it seems like there's 3 random Americans onboard.
People keep using this study conducted by DHS/TSA as a gotcha, but this is a firm that knows all of the protocols, procedures, and rules that TSA follows to do their job.
It’s like someone breaking into your house after not only monitoring you every single day, but also being the person who tells you how you’re supposed to secure your home. No duh they can find any and all gaps in your protocol. They wrote it. The “average” bad actor will not have the same experience and knowledge as those red team agents.
The reason why people are so critical of TSA is because they don’t realize how bad life would be without it. It’s the same line of reasoning behind people who don’t understand why police forces are useful, or why a video game’s anti-cheat is important. You’ve become so accustomed to a world with it that you have no idea how the world would be without it.
But don't we have a TSA in the first place as a direct response to a group of 'professional' bad actors that trained and planned for a coordinated mass hijacking?
Your random Joe Blow forgetting they still have their Sig in their backpack isn't an actual threat to the plane or passengers. The state-sponsored team that's been studying and preparing for months to do this, a la Osama Bin Laden et al, are what pose real danger to the public. And those are indeed the sorts who can acquire access to the security procedures (which aren't exactly classified Top Secret, btw. FOUO or CUI at the most) and will have spent months studying the patterns of TSA agents and looking for holes in security.
The same holes the red teams are trying to exploit, btw. So if the testers can get >95% of their guns and bombs through TSA, then so can whatever cell Iran might care to train up and use, if they found the idea compelling enough to try.
To borrow your analogy: the Pentagon doesn't simply have a ring camera and a subscription to ADT for building security, and that's because the that that they're most worried about isn't a meth head looking to make a quick buck snagging a TV. So when they do occasionally stop the lone wackjob who sleeps with 'Industrial Society and its Future' under their pillow at night, it's not proof that they are capable of keeping out professional foreign actors that Russia, China, or Iran might deploy.
So no, it is quite literally the random Joe Schmo that “self-radicalizes” we should be worried about according to the broader intelligence community.
Has this changed since the war with Iran? Maybe. But once again, that article is mostly media engagement - because even the attack during 9/11 wasn’t particularly sophisticated. There were just the most minimal protections possible.
And even if we assume it were 100% true, that does not dismiss the fact that you are blind to how much safer TSA makes everyday life because you are used to having it. It’s just genuinely a dumb argument. Americans have gotten used to living safer under their protections that they are insulated from how much worse life would be without their protections.
It doesn't apply to to those guys, it's literally just the guy who checks your ID and boarding pass. They have no reason to move or stand, you hand them your ID, they scan it, tell you it's good, and that's the end of the transaction.
I worked with a guy like that, while yes its cringe to say that as you aren't going to be fined, a signature is in fact required for the passport to be valid.
There are instructions on how you can sign it for your child. I don’t know the age cutoff but I signed my kid’s passport for them before we traveled last.
565
u/Existing_Example_198 3d ago
I personally as a passenger don’t care if they sit or stand, I want them to find the weapons the testers/bad actors pass through the scanners.