what is going on and what the conduit of information that s being released is. and so, i think it s a little bit incumbent on all of us as individuals to take the initiative to try to find out what s happening. and then, for that to be backed up, certainly, by official sources. sure, john, but as you just said, that last point was one of the most important points you made, which is the fact that there can be a lot of false alarms. you re looking an twitter and i looked on twitter plenty of times, we re in the middle of a show, and things will pop up and we think, my god, there s a shooting, and then we find out it was just a false alarm. and so right. so i m curious and concerned about our guest, damian escobar, saying he had no communication from inside the airport in that hour that he was pretty confused as to what was going on. he was rushed into a hallway, a child was trampled who was subsequently fine, but nonetheless, that s a scary 30, 45, 60 minutes with no
did fairly quickly that it was an accidental discharge. it was not a terrorist event. and so, at that point, the recovery process starts. so, i think that s going to be one of the lessons learned is to enhance the communication. yeah. there s an awful lot going on by a lot of people during all of this time. last question to you, john, but before we wrap this up, which is, are you surprised by this statistic that our reporter, jay blackman, got from a tsa agent, 80% of the guns they discover are loaded? i looked on the tsa website, and it s a slightly above 80%, and they have had a record year of number of guns that they have found and the leading airport in which guns are found is atlanta hartsfield. so, when you put all of that together, am i am i amazed or surprised that the gun was loaded? no. most guns are.
my counterparts that testified in front of congress to protect u.s. national security interests. i have a feeling very few could stand up to that test. i m going to assume with that answer, then, that you do not regret your service and your testimony that day. absolutely not. i mean, i could right now, my wife and i can take this opportunity to step back and remain silent. we chose, quite some time ago, that that was not what we were going to do. we have a voice and we are going to use that voice to protect this country. to focus on the national security threats both internal and external, and do what we can to try to make this country put this country back on make this country the shining city on the hill. make this the beacon of democracy and freedom and that s what we re going to continue to do. colonel alexander vindman, thank you. appreciate it. after the break we re going back to the breaking news at atlanta hartsfield international airport. an all-clear has been gi
accidental discharge. well, i think, first, for them to have been able to recover the airport to an operating state as quickly as they have speaks very well for the security, both the atlanta city police and the federal authorities to get atlanta up and running again. it happened much more quickly than i thought it would. that said, communication is always an essential part of the travel experience, so yes, they need to be communicating it, but first and foremost, they needed to assure that the airport was safe to start conducting operations again. and they ve done that. now, it s frustrating to someone going through it like the previous guest that somebody s not telling them anything, but everybody today has cell phones and has the ability to log in to, for example, msnbc to see
yeah. it s frightening. damian, before i let you go, i know you got a flight to catch, you need to recover. maybe get yourself a cocktail at one point, i don t know. oh, yeah. yeah. but did you have any communication from the airport while you were going through this? no. we no one had any idea what was going on. we were relying on passengers to let us know what was happening. no one had any idea what was going on. tsa had no idea. i mean and that s the thing that was frightening as well. there was no protocol. you know, there was no emergency protocol. there was nothing. there was no one to follow. tsa just ran out of the airport, and i totally get that, but i just feel like there has to be better protocol put in place for when things like this happen because no one knew anything and it was just pure chaos. how did you feel at that point that it was safe to come back in? i did not come back in. we didn t come back in.