The loaded pistol that made it past the TSA

The video: Businessman Farid Seif is not impressed with the TSA: A year ago, the Iranian-American oil executive accidentally brought a loaded Glock .40 handgun onto his flight, in his laptop bag — and the screeners at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport, the nation's eighth-busiest, didn't catch it. (Watch news video below.) "How can you miss it?" Seif told ABC News as part of a new report, adding that there was "nothing else" in his laptop bag. According to ABC, this is far from an isolated occurrence: In some airports, nearly 70 percent of guns, knives, and bomb parts got through screenings in recent tests.

The reaction: So the TSA is "all up in your junk, but they'll probably miss your Glock"? asks Adam Weinstein in Mother Jones. Given the "controversy over passengers' civil liberties," a 70 percent failure rate is "unconscionable." What this story reveals, says Mike Vilensky in New York, is that TSA screeners are just as "hung-over, tired, and... susceptible to basic human error" as the rest of us. This incident happened last year, says The Economist's Gulliver columnist, but "in the wake of the 'Don't Touch My Junk' controversy, almost any story about airport security can go viral." Watch an ABC News report:

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