A man carrying a loaded gun passed through the security checkpoint at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport without incident this past Sunday, apparently because the gun wasn’t floating in a shampoo bottle or hidden in a shoe. He then remembered he was carrying it and brought it back to the TSA authorities, who promptly charged him with “possessing or transporting a firearm into an air carrier terminal where prohibited, a misdemeanor, and released him.”

The screener who didn’t notice the gun has been removed from security duty while the TSA investigates, and they insist this was an isolated incident:

We know this is not a systemic problem in that our testing indicates TSOs [Transportation Security Officers] have a very high success rate at finding firearms. Given the high degree of reliability that our TSOs can find even carefully concealed firearms, we are evaluating every aspect of this incident.

“Loaded gun slips through airport security” [CNN]
(Photo: Getty)

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