Yes and no. But mostly no; it depends on how one defines the problem. First, let’s ask a few questions: Are there guns at airports? You bet there are, but nobody will ever know how many because airports are a public place, just as it is a near certainty there are also guns in public places such as shopping malls, train and bus depots, subway systems, parking garages, the great majority of office buildings, and a lot of vehicles on public roads. Are there guns on airplanes? Yessir, as was recently discovered about an employee gun smuggler on Delta Airlines in Atlanta, and 2,201 guns discovered at the checkpoint by TSA nationwide during the passenger screening process last year. While that’s a tiny bit more than the previous year, and suggests that “forgetful” people (or perhaps just really stupid ones) still try to pack heat in their carry-on, it comes to a total of about 0.00029623149394% of 743 million domestic and international US enplanements, or about 0.0002269072 guns on average on each of 9.7 million flights.
Yes, those are deceptive, irrelevant numbers, especially when discounting hub connections within sterile areas, etc., but that’s still too many guns where there shouldn’t be any at all. Indeed, there are a surprising number of known weapons on board all the time, carried by air marshals and various law enforcement agencies such as FBI, DEA, ATF, USSS and others on “official business”. While I am not for a moment suggesting screening is a failure – indeed, I think it’s an exceptionally good record; but everyone agrees that we don’t know what we don’t know... those 2,201 weapons are ones that were discovered; how many got through, inadvertently or purposefully, and what, if anything, can we do about it.
Which brings us to the Delta employee/smuggler, who apparently had been doing so on and off for several years, using his employee access card to bring guns into the secured area and pass them off to an already-screened passenger for re-sale in New York. This brought about the predicable knee-jerk reaction from certain Congressional and media sources who shrieked about the immediate and urgent need to close “the security loophole ... discovered Dec. 10th...”. I beg to differ: the “insider threat” has been a concern since the late 1960’s, when screening was first introduced around the time of Cuban hijackings.
It’s a tough one, regardless of where or when. 100% secure is not possible. Ever. Nobody has an insider solution that works at any scale of organization. Atlanta Airport has about 58,000 employees with ID badges; JFK has about 54,000; O’Hare about the same. A few years ago, a Customs agent pleaded guilty to a similar gun-smuggling charge. Ask the CIA, which was torn apart in the 1980s by James Angleton, then Director of Counter Intelligence; he didn’t catch Aldrich Ames although they worked together. Ask the NSA about Snowden. Ask TSA “red teams” about their covert testing of the checkpoints and screeners whose full time job is looking for threats. Ask any major airport what a ramp worker does when dozens of tasks occur in-the-moment, which in turn depends on the timing of arrivals and departures, bag load factors, gate changes, catering movements, fueling, maintenance, and about a dozen other real-time activities. Easy worker access is a necessity; one worker says he counted going out a ramp door 56 times during an 8-hour shift. After an FBI background check, when we receive our badge, we are taught in SIDA training that we – every employee – are the eyes and ears of security. See something, say something. If just one or two persons don’t maintain an appropriate level of awareness of what’s going on around them, the entire system is at risk, not just at the origin airport, but also where those guns – or drugs or explosives – are traveling to.
This could have happened anywhere. I said it could have, not that it does, and that’s the issue: we don’t know what we don’t know, and the next event at an airport, a train station or a shopping mall won’t change that. Fortunately, these types of incidents are quite rare; the great preponderance of criminal activity at airports is theft – stuff going out, not coming in. It all comes down to deciding at what cost, and how serious you are about providing that level of security – or stated another way, the universal certainty of accepting some level of insecurity. Additional measures could include enhanced airline-employee screenings, random security checks and additional TSA and law enforcement patrols in secure areas. The TSA Aviation Security Advisory Committee has been asked to review the available options to address airport security vulnerabilities... which TSA and every airport already do, regularly and extensively. It’s certainly worth another high-level look, but therein lies the rub: the high level folks usually aren’t the boots on the ground trying to make things work. Make sure you ask the ramp rat, too.
