TSA is intercepting thousands more firearms, but that’s good news!

TSA officers now are detecting firearms at a rate three times that {of what} they did just a year ago. At the same time the passenger flow that we saw in July was 25% of what we had seen in 2019. What this tells us is that reducing TSA officer distraction works in improving their performance. And TSA PreCheck is a way to achieve this same effect with a larger pool of people being screened.

According to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), in 2019, 4,432 firearms were found in carry-on luggage at airport security checkpoints. Dating back to 2014, that number jumps to more than 20,000 firearms and new research strongly suggests that number could actually have been even higher, as even more firearms may not have been detected. 

For this episode I am joined by Sheldon Jacobson from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose research in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, “Using Risk-based Security to Quantify the Number of Firearms Missed at Airport Security Checkpoints,” looks not only at the increased number of firearms found at security checkpoints over the past few years, but at the reasons behind this increase.

Want to learn more? Check out the additional links and resources listed below for more information about what was discussed in this episode.

New Research Finds the TSA May Have Missed Thousands of Firearms at Airport Security Checkpoints in 2014-2016

Using Risk-based Security to Quantify the Number of Firearms Missed at Airport Security Checkpoints, INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics

TSA officers detecting more guns at checkpoints in spite of lower passenger throughput, Transportation Security Administration