Tag Archive for: Guns

T.S.A. Confiscated Record Number of Guns at U.S. Airports in 2022

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The Transportation Security Administration intercepted a record number of guns at airport security checkpoints this year, the agency said on Friday, prompting it to increase the maximum fine for firearm violations. The move comes amid surges in air travel and gun sales across the country.

The agency said that it had stopped 6,301 guns — more than 88 percent of which were loaded — from passing beyond security checkpoints. By the end of the year the administration expects to have intercepted about 6,600 guns in carry-on bags, a 10 percent increase over the previous record of 5,972, set in 2021.

Officials increased the maximum fine for a firearms violation by nearly $1,000, to $14,950, “in order to reduce the threat of firearms at checkpoints,” the agency said in a news release.

“When a passenger brings a firearm to the checkpoint, this consumes significant security resources and poses a potential threat to transportation security, in addition to being very costly for the passenger,” the T.S.A. administrator, David Pekoske, said in a statement.

The announcement came about three months after the agency said that it was on pace to break the record once again, as air travel in the United States neared prepandemic levels.

Besides a drop in 2020, when travelers stayed home amid pandemic lockdowns, the number of firearm interceptions by the T.S.A. has steadily increased each year since 2010.

Passengers are allowed to bring guns in checked baggage, so long as the weapons are unloaded and locked in a hard-sided container. Passengers must also declare guns at the check-in counter. But guns are not allowed in carry-on bags at any T.S.A. checkpoint, even if a passenger has a concealed weapon permit.

That distinction may be behind the thousands of mishaps in recent years, some experts say. Travelers may be unfamiliar with the rules for bringing firearms on planes, especially if they have not traveled since the start of the pandemic, said Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an expert on aviation security.

“The majority of people are not doing it with malicious intent,” Dr. Jacobson said. “They’re simply…

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Students in Israel Don’t Carry Guns to Class, Contrary to Social Media Posts

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Quick Take

Israel has established strict measures in response to armed attacks on its schoolchildren. But social media posts falsely claim there have been “no school shootings in Israel” and use a photo to misleadingly suggest students carry weapons to class. Only guards and other specific personnel — not students — can carry arms in Israeli schools. 

Full Story 

A mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24 was the deadliest at a U.S. school in a decade, and has once again sparked debate about gun laws and how to protect children in the classroom.

Legislators, educators and others are proposing a variety of measures to curb the violence, including arming teachers or placing armed guards in schools. 

Comparisons also are being made to gun laws or regulatory measures taken in other countries, such as Israel, a nation that has a low number of school shootings as compared to the U.S. But as we’ve written before, some social media posts have spread misinformation about school security measures and gun control laws in Israel.

On May 29, the Independent Firearm Owners Association — which describes itself as “a gun rights, pro-privacy, pro-freedom organization” — shared a photo on Facebook showing young women walking with military-style guns. The caption reads, “No school shootings in Israel. Must be great gun control? What, they carry guns to class – oh no, not that!” The post received over 13,000 likes and 8,000 shares.

The photo has appeared in similar tweets, also claiming there are “no school shootings in Israel.”

But the Facebook post and the tweets misrepresent the individuals in the photo. And it is not true that there have been no school shootings in Israel.

We don’t know when the photo was taken. But through a reverse image search, we found the photo had been posted in 2011 on Defence.pk — a self-described “one stop resource for Pakistan defence, strategic affairs, security issues, world defence and military affairs” — with the heading, “Pictures of Women in the Armed Forces.” 

We also found the image used in an article from 2020 published by SHTF Blog, a survival blog website, titled “Israeli…

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Most major US airlines ban guns in luggage for DC flights

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Airlines and airports say they are stepping up security before next week’s presidential inauguration, with Delta and other major airlines saying they will prohibit passengers flying to the Washington area from putting guns in checked bags.

The moves follow the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump and politically tinged confrontations on some flights.

Delta Air Lines was the first to announce Thursday that it will prohibit checking guns to Washington-area airports and was followed later in the day by United, Alaska, American and Southwest. All said their bans will start Saturday and run through Inauguration Day until Jan. 23.

“We are all on high alert based on the events over the last couple weeks up in Washington,″ CEO Ed Bastian said Thursday on CNBC.

Spirit and JetBlue did not respond to requests for comment.

The airlines also announced other measures. American Airlines is bringing back a ban on serving alcohol on flights to and from the Washington area — flights go dry starting Saturday through next Thursday. Several airlines are moving crews out of downtown Washington hotels for their safety.

Earlier this week, the Federal Aviation Administration announced it will raise enforcement of rules against interfering with or assaulting airline crew members or other passengers. The FAA said that for the next two months it will stop giving warnings to violators and will instead refer their cases to law enforcement for potential charges, fines and jail terms.

FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson cited recent disturbances on planes, adding there has been “a trend after the breach of the Capitol last week.”

Key lawmakers and the head of the nation’s largest union of flight attendants have asked the FBI to place Capitol rioters on the federal no-fly list. An FBI spokesman declined to say whether any rioters have been added to the watch list, although an FBI official said Tuesday that such a move was being considered.

So far, it has fallen on the nation’s airlines to prevent an in-flight incident from getting out of control by threatening to ban people who refuse to wear masks or ignore flight attendants’ orders.

Early last week, several Trump…

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Big Tech trains guns at NSO Group over privacy concerns

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Big Tech giants, such as Microsoft, Google, Cisco, VMWare, and the Internet Association, have decided to back Facebook in a major legal battle against the NSO Group over allegations that the latter exploited a critical vulnerability in WhatsApp to inject surveillance malware into users’ devices.

In October last year, Facebook filed a lawsuit against NSO Group in California, alleging that NSO Group “used WhatsApp servers, located in the United States and elsewhere, to send malware to approximately 1,400 mobile phones and devices” and that the firm developed their malware “in order to access messages and other communications after they were decrypted on Target Devices”.

In its complaint, Facebook alleged that NSO Group and its agents used WhatsApp servers and the WhatsApp Service to send discrete malware components to target devices after setting up various WhatsApp accounts and remote servers to conceal their involvement.

Using Facebook’s servers, NSO Group initiated calls that secretly injected malicious code into target devices and then executed the codes to create a connection between the hijacked devices and its remote server. Once a connection was established, NSO Group caused target devices to download and install additional malware, including Pegasus, for the purpose of accessing data and communications.

“Between approximately January 2018 and May 2019, Defendants created WhatsApp accounts that they used and caused to be used to send malicious code to Target Devices in April and May 2019. The accounts were created using telephone numbers registered in different counties, including Cyprus, Israel, Brazil, Indonesia, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

“Defendants reverse-engineered the WhatsApp app and developed a program to enable them to emulate legitimate WhatsApp network traffic in order to transmit malicious code—undetected—to Target Devices over WhatsApp servers. Defendants’ program was sophisticated, and built to exploit specific components of WhatsApp network protocols and code,” the complaint read.

Facebook further alleged that because of NSO Group’s covert activities that caused damage to its reputation and destroyed the goodwill between the company and its users,…

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