Originally Posted by
average_passenger
There have been stories of people sneaking guns past the scanners in testing done by the tsa themselves.
There are two reasons for this that add up:
1) The TSA lacks the skills to use their shiny new toys in an effective fashion. We've repeatedly heard from various TSA employees that they're simply unable to train their personnel to read the images on the scanner. I speculate whether this is because the TSA doesn't have anyone with those skills to train others, or because the majority of TSA employees are simply untrainable.
2) The scanner doesn't detect the threats that it was supposedly "necessary" to detect - underwear bombs and guns. A metal detector would have caught the gun every time in the 5x5 failure in DFW.