[OldPossum]

To put it another way, it is not unreasonable to think that this would have ended very differently if the Costco employee had called the police and said "We have a man in our store who claims he has a concealed handgun license but we're not sure. Could you send somebody over to verify it?" I don't underestimate the ability of police to botch that up as well, but it would have likely produced a much less tense situation than "there's a guy with a gun going berserk in our store!"

This is a post much earlier in the thread. I just wanted to highlight it to point out that there really ought to be a change in the protocol for notifying the police about "a man with a gun." The dispatcher should be required to give more information than that, preferably details of what was seen and why their attention is needed.

Maybe somebody else has pointed this out.

[OldPossum]

Looking back, I see that the call included information to the effect that Mr. Scott was acting berserk, so that does modify my earlier statement, i.e., apparently that information went out via the dispatcher. It wasn’t just “a man with a gun.”

[driftdiver]

I don’t buy that the costco employee had anything to do with this except for calling the police.

The cops could have easily seen he wasn’t acting irrationally.