Say goodbye to the TSA sock hop.
What began this week as scattered reports and observations trickling in from across the nation became official Tuesday when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that, effectively immediately, airline passengers in the United States no longer will have to remove their shoes while also trying to quickly deposit electronics, belts, jackets and the contents of their pockets into various containers while going through security checks.
Good. Maybe now the TSA can focus more on finding all the guns passing through airports.
Guns everywhere
Maybe you missed the TSA press release last January. During 2024, the agency intercepted 6,678 firearms at airport security checkpoints, and about 94% of them were loaded.
That was actually a reduction over 2023, when agents found 6,737.
For you statistics nerds, the TSA says it screened more than 904 million people in 2024. That means it found 7.4 guns per million people, as opposed to 7.8 per million in ‘23.
This is not a new phenomenon. I wrote about this in 2019, after a six-day period in which the TSA found 95 guns, of which, it said, “83 were loaded and 30 had a round chambered.”
These figures shouldn’t be surprising. Surveys, including one by the Swiss-based small arms survey, estimate there are about 120 guns in circulation for every 100 Americans.
Which raises the question: If the TSA found 7.4 per million last year, how many did it miss?
How effective are TSA agents?
The last time we knew the answer to that question was in 2017, and it wasn’t good news. Undercover investigators that year were able to pass 70% of the fake weapons they secretly carried with them through security checks.
There hasn’t been a publicly reported undercover test since then. At least, not that I can find. I’m assuming that doesn’t mean the tests have stopped, just that the agency has stopped making them public, which is a problem. We rely on the TSA to make flying safe, but we can’t know how they’re doing if they aren’t transparent — other than the fact we haven’t had another 9/11-type attack, of course, which is the ultimate good news, but which also involves more than just the TSA.
But I digress. The overriding issue here has to be safety and the ability to intercept people who intend to do harm. On that score, the 19-year shoe parade was questionable.
In a blog post on viewfromthewing.com, travel expert Gary Leff said the rule was there for bureaucratic, not analytic, reasons.
Was shoe removal necessary?
It all began in 2001 — a time when tensions ran high on airplanes after 9/11. Richard Reid, a British national, tried to detonate explosives hidden in his shoe on a flight from Paris to Miami. He failed, and other passengers managed to restrain him.
From that moment on, he became known as the “shoe bomber,” and, beginning in 2002 as a voluntary measure and in 2006 as mandatory, passengers removed their shoes at TSA checkpoints.
Leff writes that this was unnecessary. “Modern scanners see through shoes. Millimeter wave AIT portals detect non‑metallic explosives on the body.”
Also, Reid was the only one who tried such a stunt. Twenty-four years later, no one has yet to light a shoe explosive mid-flight. “Designing procedures around a single data point is poor risk management,” Leff said.
Plus, it takes time to remove shoes. While announcing the change, Noem said, “It’s important that we find ways to keep people safe, but also streamline and make the process more enjoyable for every single person.”
Well, maybe not every single person. Not the people who are up to no good.
Americans love their guns. I assume many of the 6,678 firearms confiscated last year belonged to people who carry one every day and just never had the presence of mind to leave it behind when driving to the airport.
It’s not always a harmless error. A few times, guns have been discharged during security checks. In one memorable incident many years ago, a US Airways pilot discharged one in the cockpit.
Maybe, with their minds off our shoes, TSA agents can focus more on what’s really afoot.