bkfitzofDE, concord, 14 hours ago
From cousins email, " Lisa said that the swat team got to her store after 3 p.m. and banged on the store doors. The manager on duty came out of the stock room holding up the key to open the doors. 6 customers & other saleswomen followed. They would not let her open the door with the key and broke the doors down & told the manager to lay on the floor and they held a gun over her. The other people had guns held on them as they were all escourted out of the mall building. This apparently happened to all the stores throughout the mall....all 210 of them! The shooters body is still there and a robot is being sent in to be sure his body isn't armed. I hear they flew a bomb sniffing dog in from Ocean City as well. The Mall is closed tomorrow. 2 days of financial loss for all the stores!
Ghastly overreaction by police, destroying property and horrifying the townspeople with guns instead of, for instance, quickly photographing everyone's ID and setting up portable metal detectors and making them file through...
When this happened in Kenya recently and was not domestic incident but a wider-spread incident of terrorism, the DailyMail ran pictures a few days later of the stores badly looted, especially the electronic stores. By whom? The (Kenyan) police and national guard, who were the only ones with access once the shooting started and ended.
The lesson for me is, if I'm ever in this situation and have any means whatsoever of getting outside the mall instead of going into safe rooms, I'm going to try to get out.
This may have been an over-reaction by the po-po, but I watched an active shooter training presentation for work, and one of the things the speaker emphasized was that the cops will not have time for niceties while trying to get as many people out unharmed as possible. They may yell at you, manhandle you, even put you in cuffs, as the situation is resolved.
FWIW.