Fort Lauderdale, FL – The suspect in a deadly shooting at a Florida airport used a gun that he had stored in his checked luggage, raising questions about airport security and whether safety officials need to change the current rules.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
Esteban Santiago, 26, retrieved his gun from his bag on the carousel, loaded it in a bathroom of the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, then emerged shooting in the baggage-claim area Friday, killing five people and wounding eight, authorities said.
Transportation Security Administration rules prohibit guns in carry-on bags, but they allow passengers to ship guns if they are unloaded, put in a hard-sided, locked container that only the owner has the ability to unlock, and placed in a checked bag. Explosive or flammable ammunition such as gun powder is banned, but bullets are legal if carried in checked baggage.
That means gun owners can’t get to their weapons during a flight but can easily retrieve and load them after claiming their checked bags.
“This guy found a way to exploit a weakness in the system,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel analyst in San Francisco.
A ban on shipping guns in luggage would hurt law-abiding hunters, he said, “but I don’t think the TSA and FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) can ignore what happened. How many airline passengers today are worried that they are vulnerable?”
This is not the first shooting using weapons in checked baggage. In 1972, three members of the Japanese Red Army terror group retrieved guns and grenades from their bags after landing in Tel Aviv, Israel, and killed 26 people.
“This guy followed the script from 1972,” said Jeffrey Price, an aviation-security expert who teaches at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Price said that banning guns in luggage might have prevented Friday’s attack but wouldn’t stop a determined killer.
“What’s to stop him from driving to the airport, parking his car, getting his gun and going into the airport and shooting people?” Price said.
A TSA spokesman referred The Associated Press to the agency’s current rules but declined to comment further, including on whether Friday’s shooting would lead to a review of those rules.
The TSA does not track the number of guns that passengers place in checked bags, but it is not a rare practice. Most airlines detail their gun-carrying policies on their websites. Santiago had flown out of Anchorage, Alaska. So many hunters from the Lower 48 visit Alaska that the state’s Fish and Game Department also describes on its site how to travel with guns.
Price noted that passengers wishing to check guns must declare them and show that they are unloaded. He said airlines often have the gun inspected by TSA officers in another part of the airport. It’s enough of an inconvenience, he said, that he tells hunters to mail or use a delivery service to ship the gun to their destination.
The TSA has been confiscating more guns from carry-on bags. Screeners took away 2,653 guns in 2015, up 20 percent from 2014. The TSA frequently tweets photos of the arsenal that it scoops up at checkpoints.
There is only one question that Americans should be asking – ‘should we get rid of all guns as they have done in Australia?’
Trumpf and his Reich administrators are tweeting about the shooter being an ISIS guy without any proof. Turns out he’s yet another US Army vet nut, who turned up a number of times at military and FBI offices and was sent away, allowed to KEEP HIS GUN. Turns out our protectors are not all that bright when it comes to discerning obvious threats. This guy was stoppable.
In Israel, one can not even enter airport parking lots or the the building of the airport without going through security! No system is perfect, but this guy was unstable and shouldn’t have been allowed to possess a gun.
its not about guns in baggage
the problem is too many crazy people in usa have guns and or buy guns
To #2 -Why don’t you learn how to spell Trump’s name correctly? You intentionally add an “r” to emphasize his German ancestry. The fact of the matter, is that his Father, Fred Trump was very friendly to Jews, and insisted on renting his apartments to a majority of Jews, since he knew that they were good tenants. When Trump Village was first built in Brighton Beach in 1964, and for many years afterwards, a majority of the tenants were Jews.
There are reports that he was radicalized, but don’t worry you won’t hear it from main stream media.
Guns are forbidden in the departures area, so the check them into the baggage area. If they forbid them in the baggage, them bring them to the door of the airport. If they forbid them there, they’ll bring them to the nearest boundary where they’re permitted. Or to a building. Or a theater. Or a stadium. The only way to keep guns away from everywhere is to ban them everywhere, and have detectors everywhere