Report: Atlanta TSA Screeners Missed Loaded Gun

The Transportation Safety Administration is investigating after a passenger on a flight from Atlanta said he accidentally brought a loaded gun in his luggage that was not detected by screeners.

Blake Alford spoke to The Daily Mail in an interview and said he arrived at his Chicago hotel only to discover he’d accidentally left his Ruger .380 semiautomatic handgun inside his backpack and inadvertently took it with him on his Southwest flight. Alford said the weapon had seven rounds loaded in it.

The TSA has drawn recent criticism for failing to detect fake weapons and bombs intentionally left in luggage for training purposes. However, the agency says it did detect almost 2,500 firearms across the country between January and October of this year, the Atlanta Journal Constitution says.

In July 2015, a TSA spokesperson said that agents at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport had found 92 firearms in security checkpoints, the highest January to July total for any airport ever. The mid-year total is almost as high as 2014’s year-end total of 104 firearms detected at Atlanta’s checkpoints, the spokesperson added.