I can understand why AC is suspicious of old people standing around calmly providing play-by-play commentary as a wind-up toy runs around shooting people, including police, right in front of them, but then, it could simply be Boomers booming. I don’t think those who are younger than Gen X realize how much the average Boomer resembles a dodo bird with regards to their total inability to register danger:
I’m telling you, the old people in this, just standing in the front door, all blase and relaxed texting on their phone, saying, ‘Yeah, the shooter went in the store, right in there behind me,” as gunshots go off right behind them, or standing around the back of the building with walkers but not moving away to safety, are surveillance, and I would say it is 99.9{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} they are some form of operational support for the shooting, watching the perimeter for the central control running the operation.
I can’t explain exactly what it is I see when I look at them, but they are coverage – I see that all the time. It is almost like they are on a different frequency as they stand there, and it stands out from what you would expect them to look like they are doing and thinking. Ask yourself, if you were an obese, decrepit old geezer, and some dude was popping shots off inside that store, and you had dead bodies strewn about your feet as you stood in the doorway, and a livestreamer nut was screaming in front of you, would you just stand there in the middle of the carnage, looking down into your phone, only pausing to look up saying, “Oh yeah the shooter is right behind me, in the store, he went in right that way over there” as you text away and gunshots go off? Or would you be too busy getting the hell out of there?
And there is the old couple in back with a walker. How did they get there, given the store floor level is about four feet higher due to it being a loading dock behind them, and there are no cars anywhere near? Did they walk around back there from the front, with a walker, instead of going to their car? Why aren’t they moving to a car, or at least away from the store, given a shooter could come out a door there at any moment? What are they doing there? And there just happens to be a guy on the opposite side of the back covering the other corner towards them, who walks away from the streamer as he approaches, and another guy with a semi-afro, watching the side, from the back corner up to the front.
None of them are rendering aid, they are not seeking cover or concealment, or moving to their car, or even assessing where the shooter might be. They are all just on post, with no sense of danger, and for some reason know they aren’t going to get shot. Notice vehicular units driving through the parking lot too, all throughout it. At least a few of those are support coverage. I will bet if I was in the parking lot and pulled an AR-15 out of my trunk, to sneak around back, go inside and confront the shooter, minuteman style, those people would radio that into control, in its basement control center, and control would get on the shooter’s earpiece to guide him to either meet me or describe to him how to evade me and make it to a new site, based on what perimeter surveillance was telling him about my movements in real time.
That cop may very well have been sacrificed just like that to make this a heinous shooting for maximal effect. I will bet this is why we do not see more of these characters offed by armed patriots on the spot. These operations are run under much more controlled conditions, with far more resources than we would believe possible.
It is peculiar how many of these “active shooter incidents” always seem to take place in locations where there are a lot of bystanders around but very few of them are armed in any way. Despite the fact that I don’t even know anyone, male or female, who doesn’t at least carry a knife, if not a concealed firearm on a daily basis, you never seem to hear about any of these active shooters being jumped by several people and being stabbed or beaten to death.
It’s not like people don’t fight back in real life. My grandfather took on a 28-year-old carjacker armed with a .38 in Alexandria, Virginia. He slapped the gun out of his face, repeatedly punched the guy in the face so many times that he broke his hand, then shoved the stunned guy into the car and locked him into it. He was 73 at the time.
My mother was furious with him, of course, but he was unconcerned. He’d survived Guadacanal and Tarawa, so “some punk with a popgun” hardly counted as dangerous from his perspective.