Flier carrying .40 caliber rifle in luggage said his mom must have packed it, TSA says
A Hagerstown, Md., man intending to fly out of Baltimore said he has no idea there was a .40 caliber rifle stashed away in his luggage — then blamed his mother for it, CBS Baltimore reported.
The Transportation Security Administration stopped the man as he was passing carry-on luggage through a scanner at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, according to WUSA.
Officials said when they told him about the gun, which wasn’t loaded, the man said he knew nothing about it because his mother had packed his bag, the station reported.
“That excuse just doesn’t fly,” TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said, according to WTOP
The agency pulls thousands of firearms from travelers’ baggage each year. In 2017, the administration confiscated nearly 4,000 guns, or about 11 every day. The vast majority of them (84 percent) were loaded, and more than a third had a round chambered, according to the administration.
“The most common excuse we hear is ‘I forgot I had my gun with me,’ and more than 80 percent of those guns are loaded, so people are telling us that they forgot they had a loaded handgun with them,” Farbstein said, according to WTOP. “The idea is that nobody should have access to a gun in the cabin of a plane.”
The 22-year-old man, who has not been identified, was charged with illegally possessing a firearm, violating airport security procedures and having a weapon in an airport, according to the Baltimore Sun. He has a court hearing set for Dec. 19, the paper reported.
The TSA said security violations like this one cause headaches for other passengers and cause delays.
“When someone brings a firearm to a checkpoint, it closes the checkpoint lane until the situation can be resolved, thus forcing the other travelers to shift into another lane and delaying their passage through the checkpoint,” the administration said in a news release.
Violations for bringing firearms into an airport can be steep. A first offense could set you back $3,920, according to the TSA, and total fines could go as high as $13,000 plus criminal referrals.