Anyone heard as to where/how the shooter accessed his ammunition? While checking a handgun in luggage (not carry on) is very common, I don’t think ammunition can be in the same piece of luggage.
According to the TSA, guidelines, anything less than .75 cal can be carried in the same luggage:
Do we know the shooter was on a flight? I don’t know about Ft. Lauderdale, but in most of the airports I’ve been to, the baggage claim is outside the security zone.
ETA:
NYT article may be behind paywall
This article claims he flew in from Alaska on a Delta Airlines flight. Previously it was reported that he flew on Air Canada but they denied having a passenger by that name.
By the way, my understanding is that the TSA is mostly concerned with the safety of air travel specifically which is why there is such tight security getting into the boarding area. Areas like the terminal or baggage claim are accessed prior to and following the flight (respectfully) which is why they aren’t as secure.
I’m not sure if this is going to impact how air travel safety is viewed; this could have just as easily happened just outside the airport, or for that matter at a shopping mall or sporting event. I don’t see this changing security policies at airports much. I might be wrong though.
This reminds me of a hijacking of a Japanese airline which happened while I lived there.
A man had figured out how to breach security by flying into the Tokyo Haneda airport, picking up his checked bag and then going back to the gates. The baggage pickup is in the secure area and non-passengers are prohibited from entering. At that time there weren’t any measures to prevent passengers from going back to the gates after retrieving their bags.
He approached the airport, showed them this flaw, and then asked for a job. After he was refused employment, and the airport didn’t take any further steps to correct this, he actually used it to hijack a plane with a knife in a checked bag.
Nothing like going to prison to prove your point.
<nitpick>Predictive text can be really amusing sometimes - People should be respectful<nitpick>
Freaking autocorrect, sorry about that.
Having been there countless times, I can also confirm that FLL baggage claim is outside of security. There is nothing to stop you from just walking in from the sidewalk.
The regulation states that your firearm(s) and up to 5kg of ammunition may be checked in one same gun case. The firearm itself has to be unloaded and safed but all that is necessary to put it in shooting condition can go in the same case. Plus, even if you had to keep them separate, then it would be a matter of just picking up two pieces of luggage instead of one anyway. The layout of luggage claim at FLL is such that as stated a gunman could have stepped in through the door off the sidewalk, so no air-travel-specific measure could have prevented this. And quite really there is only so much we can do, at some point in the transportation sequence you will HAVE to transition to open public space and the ticketing counter departing and baggage claim conveyor arriving are reasonable points.
Well, if he had waited to get an interview maybe the airport would have detected a phenomenon known as Dude Be Homicidal Nuts.
But that bad design was probably an issue of a “legacy” architectural layout originally designed to favor keeping people other than passengers away from the bags. In most airports if you have to clear customs at a connection point or re-check your bags to a different airline manually, you have to re-clear security precisely because it means you now have had access to your checked luggage and its contents. Even at SJU where it has been ticketed-pax-only in the airside area since the checkpoints went up 40 years ago, it has also been ticketed-pax-only in the baggage claim, but you can only leave baggage claim towards the landside section, you cannot backtrack – notice this could not have prevented *this *sort of shooting-at-arrvals incident either.
I don’t know why the media and everyone are so fascinated with the fact that the gun/ammo were in his luggage. The baggage claim is an unsecured area. You can just pick up a gun anywhere in FL, drive to the airport and walk into the baggage claim area. So the special significance that seems attached to the “gun in checked luggage” fact baffles me.
I think it’s two things in combination:
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because we’ve had it drilled into us that you can’t take dangerous things like guns aboard the airplane, and most people don’t appreciate that only applies to the cabin carry-on luggage;
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Unless you’re a gun-owner who has travelled with a gun, it probably never even occurs to you to ask how someone in legal possession of a gun can travel with it.
So, just general unawareness of the issue would be my guess.
Japanese airports and airlines have been really lax about security. I think most of the airports there allowed you to do this, as well as not requiring real names years after that became standard in the States.
Seems odd to go to that much trouble. Anyone can take a gun into a baggage terminal, much easier to do it if you haven’t been on a flight.
At this point we don’t know (AFIAK) whether his intent all along was to go to Florida to shoot up the FLL airport.
Or whether he was simply traveling to Florida to be near family, friends, warm weather, etc., and then the voices in his head went homicidal during his airplane ride.