No, You Still Can’t Bring Your Gun on a Plane

The Transportation Security Administration has gone to great lengths to get the message through to Atlanta airport passengers: Don’t bring your gun through security. It’s plastered signs on checkpoint walls. It’s blared announcements over loudspeakers. It’s thrown a warning up on video screens for passengers to stare at while they wait in line.

And yet, 298 firearms were seized at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International’s security checkpoints in 2018, the most at any U.S. airport that year. According to a Bloomberg Government analysis of TSA records, gun seizures there have tripled since 2014, when then-Governor Nathan Deal signed a law that allowed Georgians to carry a firearm in more places. Even as a percentage of the almost 26 million passengers who passed through security there last year, the number of gun seizures put Hartsfield-Jackson flyers in a virtual tie with those at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas for worst-offender status among the nation’s 30 largest airports.