A Rhode Island man was looking for a smooth getaway at the JFK International Airport, but he found himself in a crunchy situation with the TSA.
According to the TSA, the unnamed perpetrator will face a civil penalty of up to $15,000 for attempting to smuggle plastic-wrapped gun parts for a .22 caliber semi-automatic handgun, including a loaded magazine, inside two peanut butter jars.
“The gun parts were artfully concealed in two smooth creamy jars of peanut butter, but there was certainly nothing smooth about the way the man went about trying to smuggle his gun,” John Essig, TSA’s Federal Security Director for JFK Airport, said in a statement.
The unidentified man was planning to take the parts onto his flight before his baggage triggered an alarm at the security checkpoint in Terminal 8. The Port Authority police quickly arrested the man and confiscated his baggage. There has been no official word on where he was flying.
Last month, another unidentified person was caught trying to smuggle a gun inside of a raw chicken in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. The TSA in this case had a little more fun by calling out the perpetrator on social media.
“There’s a personal fowl here. Our officers at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL) @FLLFlyer made this very raw find. We hate to break it to you but stuffing a firearm in your holiday bird for travel is just a baste of time,” the TSA captioned on their Twitter page.
There’s a personal fowl here. Our officers @FLLFlyer made this very raw find. We hate to break it to you but stuffing a firearm in your holiday bird for travel is just a baste of time. So, don’t wing it, you'll find all the proper packaging info here: https://t.co/Zm2XnorDx7 pic.twitter.com/BpdbEwwouX
— TSA (@TSA) November 7, 2022
SEE ALSO: TSA Finds Gun Stuffed Inside Raw Chicken
After the incident, the TSA released a statement indicating they have already confiscated 700 guns in the state this year. This uptick seems to be on par with a rise in the national average according to an earlier report from the TSA.
“Nationwide, TSA officers detected 5,972 firearms at airport security checkpoints in 2021. It was a significant increase from the 3,257 detected last year (2020) and a spike from the 4,432 detected in 2019 (pre-pandemic),” the report states. “The rate of guns caught at checkpoints nationwide came to of 10.2 firearms per million passengers in 2021. Of the guns caught in 2021, approximately 86 percent were loaded. Firearms were caught at 268 airport checkpoints nationwide.”
As of Dec. 16, more than 6,300 firearms were stopped in the United States this year.
Even though peanut butter and chickens make attention-worthy headlines, most stops were due to ignorance of airport regulations and laws.
Earlier this year, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), chairwoman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on transportation and maritime security, sponsored a bill that would increase penalties and education.
Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez (Fla.), the top Republican on the subcommittee, objected to harsher penalties but agreed that public education is an important factor to be addressed, as well as higher pay for TSA officers.
“Our dedicated transportation security officers. … They deserve better pay that is reflective of the immense value that they provide to our aviation system,” Gimenez said in The Washington Post article.
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