Cannonballs, samurai swords, chastity belts: Items found at TSA checkpoints in 2012

The Transportation Safety Administration is not merely a government agency. It is also a kind of real-time library, tracking the human folly that plays out at some of the human folly-est places there are: airports. Now, the TSA has released information from a year's worth of checkpoint-monitoring ... and the information it has presented is, unsurprisingly, folly-filled. (Among the objects confiscated from passenger luggage: cane swords, bottles of gunpowder, and "more inert grenades than you would ever imagine.") 

Here are some of the TSA's takeaways -- some of them literal -- from a year's worth of airport screenings and confiscations:

• Passengers screened, total: 637,582,122
• Passengers screened, per day: 1,746,800
• Total firearms discovered in carry-on bags at checkpoints across the country: 1,543
• Number of those firearms that were loaded 1,215 
• Percentage of those firearms that were loaded: 78.7
• Number of airports at which firearms were found: 199
• Airport that had the highest number of firearms found: Atlanta (ATL)
• Number of firearms found, total, at ATL alone: 95
• Average number of firearms found per week at ATL alone: 1.8

Read more at The Atlantic.