For Once, the TSA Is Right

A passenger sneaked a firearm through airport security in Atlanta earlier this month before flying with it to Tokyo. This has attracted a lot of media attention, with CNN, Time, CBS, The Hill, The Washington Post, and others publishing write-ups of the incident.
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So is the shutdown making airports less safe? Was it the stalemate in Washington, D.C., that allowed someone to slip a gun past TSA screeners?
The short answer: probably not. The story about the firearm appears to have been first reported by WSB-TV, an ABC affiliate based in the Atlanta area. On January 2, a man boarded his Delta flight to Japan with a firearm. Once he landed, he informed Delta workers that he had a gun. Delta in turn informed the TSA, who said in a statement that "standard procedures were not followed."
The TSA insists the shutdown had nothing to do with the incident. "The perception that this might have occurred as a result of the partial government shutdown would be false," the agency said in a statement to the press. "In fact, the national callout percentages were exactly the same for Wed, 1/2/19 and Wed, 1/3/18 (when there was no shutdown)-5%," an agency spokesperson added in an email to Reason.
In other words, this wasn't the shutdown; it was just normal TSA incompetence.
Sounds plausible to me. The TSA has a pretty bad track record when it comes to identifying items that could actually pose a threat. A 2015 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) investigation, for instance, revealed that in 67 out of 70 cases, undercover investigators succeeded in smuggling weapons or explosives through security.