Handful of guns seized at DTW within a few days
ROMULUS, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) – In a span of four days, TSA officers at Detroit Metropolitan Airport (DTW) prevented five guns from making it onboard flights. All of them were loaded.
Guns getting confiscated at checkpoints is pretty common at airports around the country. According to the TSA, it's about a dozen or so each day.
What's unusual about the ones confiscated at DTW is how many they stopped in a few days.
"It's never okay to bring a gun to the checkpoint. We're going to find it. It's a costly, expensive, dangerous mistake," said Jessica Mayle, a regional TSA spokesperson.
It's something that five gun owners in Metro Detroit recently learned the hard way.
"Occasionally someone will say like, 'Oh, that's my husband's bag', or 'another member of my family maybe put that in.' But usually, it is the person who packed it, and they did it, and they just forgot that the gun was in there," Mayle said.
It's what happened last Thursday when a passenger was about to step into the body scanner when asked a TSA officer if he could give her something that he forgot. It turned out to be a gun.
The next day during the morning rush, three guns were found at DTW checkpoints within an hour and a half.
Then on Sunday, someone tried to bring a gun in their carry-on, but an X-ray picked it up.
"Think about the checkpoint situation. It's crowded, it's busy, a lot of people doing different things. You don't want to introduce a loaded gun into that environment," Mayle said.
But it seems that more and more gun owners are making that mistake.
Last year the TSA found more than 6,500 firearms in passengers' carry-on luggage, an increase of nearly 10 percent from the year before.
In an interview with CBS News, John Pistole, a former TSA administrator, credits the rise in CT scanners now in use with the increase in seized weapons.
"It's like a X-ray on steroids," Pistole said. "It literally allows the officer to manipulate the screen so they're seeing the object, the carry-on bag from different angles, and in 3 dimensional."
Passengers are allowed to travel with firearms if it's with their checked baggage and declared at the airline check-in counter.
The weapon must also be unloaded, and packed separately from the ammo in a locked hard case.
Those caught trying to bring it through a checkpoint face a fine of up to $15,000.
"There's a lot of factors that go into determining what the size of the fine: is your first offense, was the gun artfully concealed? Were you trying to hide it from us versus, again, just sort of forgetting it in your bag? We take all of those factors into account," Mayle said.
So far, TSA officers have confiscated 28 guns here at DTW, last year it was 100.
Since it's early in the year, the TSA hopes they don't have to hit that number again.