I thought our military services recruited from all states?
Does no one return once they are discharged from our armed forces?
The cops are utterly untrained?
The mall cops must be so proud of their lack of object identification skills!
Who’s going top pay for this debacle, sounds pretty expensive to put such a large force into action on such poor intelligence.
Fat Teddy’s personal body-guard got caught with an illegal machine-gun several years ago, so some residents there at least used to handle firearms.
My bet would be if a Burlington cop, or even Paul Blart, had seen the guy, he would have realized it was only an umbrella and not given the guy a second look. And it's quite likely the guy was directly observed by Burlington police and / or mall guards. Whenever I go there, I generally encounter both while walking through the halls.
The way these things seem to get started is, a hare-brained citizen jumps to a conclusion and makes a breathless report. Then the police have to assume the worst until proven otherwise.
A few years ago we witnessed this phenomenon when a 19-year old MIT student named Star Simpson went to Logan Airport to pick up her arriving boyfriend. She was wearing a nerdy piece of artwork
that had green LEDs in the shape of a star driven by a small circuit board powered by a nine-volt battery. The illegal immigrant whom she approached with a question at a counter in Terminal C called the cops and reported a person with a suicide bomb under her sweatshirt. Predictably, the result was chaos.
And to think, just a few miles away, on this day,
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.