The airport business was tough during the Year Of CV-19, wasn’t it?  Traffic was down to near-nothing systemwide; no revenues from airline rates and charges, parking, concessions, fuel, FBOs, tenant rentals and more, and your overhead, maintenance and salaries hardly budged at all.  But all those people who couldn’t and/or  wouldn’t travel for more than a year are finally coming back to fill fewer airplanes, demonstrating one universal truth:  isolation and loneliness can make people become really stupid.

Over just the recent July 4^th holiday weekend TSA picked up 70 guns at security checkpoints, 62 of them loaded, nearly the number caught in all of 2020. In the first six months of 2021, TSA found almost 3,000 firearms; In all of CV-19-depressed 2020, they officers found 3,257 firearms. In 2019, officers found 4,432 guns.  This narrative doesn’t include such inventive distractions as a bag with a gun and a hatchet, and a loaded gun stashed inside a Nerf toy ...  apparently, the kids need some distractions during the layover, too.

As always, the overwhelmingly popular excuse remains: “After almost 20 years of constant reminders, advertisements, governmental urgings, and continuous signs throughout virtually every airport in the free world, I forgot I packed those forbidden deadly weapons in my carry-on bag for easy access if trouble arises.”  There may be some small foundation for some of those statistics -  US gun sales rose 40% last year alone, to a total of 36,695,315 (100,535 sold every day!) with the first five months of 2021 surging 26% to over 19 million... the most since such figures have been recorded.  Strangely interesting, Illinois, with only 4% of the population, had the most - 27% of the gun sales for that period:  5,285,820.  [ ORD and MDW, take note. ] The FBI reported that the great majority were previous gun owners buying more; about 20% of all sales were to first-time gun owners.  In either case, you don’t need to give a reason.

Let’s translate that to discussions of  airport security.  According to TSA, just the first 12 days of July totaled 24,225,252 persons screened – averaging 2,018,771 passengers each day, while an average of 100,535 new guns are being purchased each  day and added to the relatively permanent arsenal of roughly 114  million existing handguns (not rifles or shotguns) , according to ATF.  Extrapolating  that statistically for highly unlikely conversational purposes of even distribution here, that’s roughly 412,838 different guns in closet,  cars (or suitcases)  for every day of the year.  Again, assuming an even distribution among FAA’s estimate of  5,670  passenger flights in the US airspace every day, there are 72 different handguns that “exist” in the US for every flight every day – 6 of them purchased brand new on (each) day of each flight. 

Pandemic related new gun sales are clearly diminishing rapidly, but the cumulative arsenal outlined above, and the transition of  some first-time buyers to repeat acquisitions ought to scare the bejeebers out of anyone and everyone that flies, especially given the general hostility and civil unrest of the current political environment.  TSA and FBI  have stated these are identified trends, not anomalies, and the added attention in the screening lines is slowing down queue ... where the jerks who “forgot” they were packing heat are becoming more and more nervous about missing flights and/or being found out.

TSA is now fining  passengers up to $2,475 for bringing unloaded guns through checkpoints and up to $10,000 for a first offense of bringing a loaded gun; $15,000 or more for some criminal prosecutions, A typical year of “bad behavior” for FAA has exploded from 150 formal cases to 2,500 so far this year,1900 of them for non-compliance with the federal mask mandate.   

I am by no means suggesting that such a nationwide saturation of weapons exists in airports or aircraft at this time, but it could, because the inventory (see above) is already in the hands of  the good guys, the bad guys, and the stupid guys.  An arsenal of weaponry hardware will reside in hiding and grow for many years while the public awareness cycle further dims in the memory of those who “forget” why their carry-on is several pounds heavier on this trip.