Firearms found at TSA checkpoints

It is a curious fact about the universe that as Americans have grown increasingly anxious about being shot at the airport, they have simultaneously demanded to pay more for the privilege of watching other people get shot at the cinema. One might expect these two trends to move in opposite directions, rather like a seesaw operated by someone who has fundamentally misunderstood how seesaws work. Yet there they are, practically holding hands across fifteen years of data.

The real culprit here is almost certainly economic growth and inflation, that great invisible hand that makes everything cost more while making people proportionally more worried about everything. As disposable income rose between 2009 and 2023, Americans spent more on entertainment—ticket prices climbed from about eight dollars to nearly eleven—while simultaneously, TSA staffing and security procedures expanded to match a recovering travel industry. Add in population growth (we had roughly 17 million more people by 2023) and the nervous energy of post-2001 security consciousness, and you have two entirely separate phenomena responding to the same underlying economic rhythm, much like two violins in an orchestra that happen to play in the same key by coincidence rather than design.

This is what happens when you look at enough numbers long enough: the universe begins to reveal patterns that are not, technically, patterns at all, but rather two unrelated phenomena being pushed by the same inflationary tide. We are pattern-seeking creatures in a world of coincidence, and we are neither wrong nor entirely right to notice these things. The correlation is real; the connection is not.