I think that a few tier-one teams (ST-6, Delta, SAS, HRT etc) would have taken that shot, plate glass window and all. They practice with all kinds of glass at all ranges and angles with known deflection data. They’d know the type / thickness of glass from the architectural plans. Then it’s all accessed from dope books. Bang, you’re dead.
They might have - but then you are also dealing with the issues of the human shields, and the potential of explosives accompanied by a deadman’s switch.
I don’t know if they made the right call. That will, I expect, come out over time. I’m just a bit sick of all the amateurs who seem to be looking for reasons to criticise.
IF they had access to the building, a first rate unit could have done all kinds of things, and not just from a distance.
If this was just a cafe, then the police had all the walls and entrances for their use, it was’t as though this was trained terrorist team, inside of a commercial airliner, isolated and parked out on a runway or something. In this situation they would have been watching them through the walls with fiber optics and had multiple entrances to use, or could have used frame charges to burst into the room at the same time as the sniper shot, they may have shot him through a hole in a wall, and God knows what the real cutting edge methods are.
This seems like a pretty ideal hostage situation for the good guys, yet it resulted in big losses.
The police supposedly refused help from the Army’s Special Operations Counter Terrorist unit.