TSA thwarts woman’s attempt to bring loaded gun on plane
In Virginia, officers at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport stopped a local woman on Christmas Eve from attempting to bring a loaded gun onto a plane, as announced in a Tuesday news release from the TSA.
During security checks, an X-ray machine revealed a firearm in the woman’s carry-on bag, prompting the TSA’s intervention. The gun was confiscated, and the woman was cited on a weapons charge, with John Busch, the TSA’s federal security director for the airport, stating that “Bringing a gun to an airport security checkpoint was no way to enter the holiday.”
Busch emphasized the importance of ensuring that firearms are unloaded, locked in a hard-sided case, and declared at the airline check-in counter, rather than attempting to bring them to a security checkpoint. The woman could potentially face a civil penalty of thousands of dollars, with fines for carrying weapons being as high as $15,000.
This incident marked the 39th firearm confiscated at the airport in 2023, setting a single-year record at Reagan National. Interestingly, this surpassed the previous record of 30 firearms seized in 2021.
The TSA had previously released third-quarter data which indicated a rise in travelers attempting to bring loaded firearms to U.S. airport security checkpoints, and it’s expected that the number of firearms intercepted in 2023 will exceed last year’s record of over 6,500.
