North Carolina man arrested after trying to bring loaded gun onto 9/11 flight at RIC
Table of Contents
A North Carolina man was arrested Sept. 11 by police after Transportation Security Administration officers at Richmond International Airport caught him with a loaded handgun in his carry-on bag. The .45-caliber handgun was loaded with five bullets, including one in the chamber.
TSA officers stopped the man when his carry-on bag triggered an alarm in the security checkpoint X-ray unit. Upon spotting the weapon, TSA alerted airport police, who responded to the checkpoint, confiscated the handgun and arrested the man.
“You would think that our nation’s high awareness of the happenings of September 11, 2001, would remind people that TSA is on the job to help ensure that another catastrophic incident does not happen again,” said Robin “Chuck” Burke, TSA’s federal security director for the airport. “Especially on this solemn day, this traveler should have known better than to try to carry a firearm through our security checkpoint and onto a flight. Instead he was arrested and faces a stiff financial civil penalty.”
Sunday’s incident was the 14th time this year that TSA officials had stopped a gun at an RIC checkpoint, following 20 such occurrences last year and 22 in 2020.
