TSA Firearm Detections
Every year the Transportation Security Administration detects thousands of guns at its airport screening checkpoints around the United States.
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Details
The TSA publishes figures on how many firearms it detects at airport screening checkpoints, but comprehensive figures aren’t broken down by airport in a publicly available format.
A request by the Gun Violence Data Hub for the records yielded five separate spreadsheets of gun detection data, broken down by airport, covering 2020 to 2024. TSA categorizes detected guns by their ammunition status: loaded, unloaded, and unknown. The tables also include a total column.
The gun detection figures can be misleading without the context of how many screenings an airport experiences each year. Busier airports will naturally have higher total gun detections, but might have comparably lower rates of detection than a less-busy airport with lower total detections, but a higher rate.
To calculate a rate of detections per 100,000 screenings, the Data Hub obtained throughput data for TSA screening checkpoints. Those figures measure the number of people who were screened at each airport, and include general public passengers as well as airport/airline staff. In other words, all people who passed through a TSA checkpoint.
We also used information from the open data site OurAirports to augment the details available for each airport, adding information including state, city/region, latitude, longitude, and elevation.
This data does not convey any information about what happens to the firearms after they are detected because TSA does not take possession of or confiscate firearms, according to an agency spokesperson.
“When a firearm is detected at a security checkpoint, TSA officers immediately contact local law enforcement, who remove the passenger and the firearm from the checkpoint area,” the spokesperson wrote in a February 2025 email to the Data Hub. “Depending on local laws, the law enforcement officer may arrest or cite the passenger.”
Limitations
Missing year + airport combinations
Not all airports are present in each year of data. If an airport is missing from a given year that is because TSA made no detections that year, according to an agency spokesperson.
Methodology
The Data Hub obtained a total of 10 Excel files from the TSA via a request — five gun detection, and five checkpoint throughput — each covering an individual year from 2020 to 2024.
Detection tables were cleaned by removing rows at the bottom of each sheet that contained totals and adding a year column to each sheet corresponding to the year of that file.
Throughput tables lacked consistent column headers and years. Columns were limited to airport codes and throughput figures. A year column was added to each table.
Detection files were joined together into one table and throughput files were joined into another. Those two combined tables were further merged on airport code values. Airport information from OurAirports was added, again merging on airport code values. Some airport information was omitted for brevity.
Detection rates per 100,000 screenings were calculated using total_weapon_count ÷ throughput × 100,000.
Usage
Rank airports by gun detection in your state
- Use the filters in the Download section above to isolate your state.
- Open the file in your spreadsheet program of choice. (Here’s an example Google Sheet using Florida data.)
- Create a pivot table on the code or name columns, summing both the total_weapon_count and throughput columns.
- Create a calculated column using the total_weapon_count ÷ throughput × 100,000 formula.
- Order the pivot table in descending order on that calculated column.
- This table now represents airports in your state ranked by the overall rate of firearm detection from 2020 to 2024.