Okay, okay, “snitches” is a little strong. I’m sure Maki is a good boy. He’s just doing what he was trained to do, which is to sniff out concealed firearms on customers in five Houston shopping malls.
“Concealed means concealed” unless, apparently, you’re patronizing the following Brookfield Properties’ malls: Baybrook, Deerbrook, First Colony, Willowbrook, and The Woodlands. Here in Texas, an establishment can post a 30.06 “no guns allowed” sign, violation of which is a Class A misdemeanor.
To enforce their policy, Brookfield Properties is employing Maki and his security guard handler, Paul Blart, to sniff the shoppers (“pull a Biden”) and alert on any who may be armed with more than mom’s credit card, a keen fashion sense, and a taste for Auntie Anne’s pretzels.
From The Houston Chronicle:
When Brookfield’s firearm-sniffing dog goes on alert — Brookfield keeps the exact means of notification under wraps — a member of the mall’s security team will politely approach the customer and ask them if they have a gun on them, LaClave said. If the answer is yes, they’re asked to remove the weapon from the property.
[. . .] On at least one occasion since the program’s launch in March, the dog alerted falsely because the person had been at a shooting range earlier in the day, she said.
Yeah, bro, it’s Texas. I guarantee you that dog is browning his pants if he gets a whiff of me.
Seriously though, here’s the real problem (again from the same Houston Chronicle article):
“The measure is an effort to stave off shootings and make people feel safe coming to shop” . . .
“This is not the first time Brookfield has taken a proactive step to address the threat of gun violence” . . .
“In this environment, a firearm sniffing dog is a boon for customers’ sense of security” . . .
This is absurd. No mass shooter bursting into a mall all kitted up and blasting away is going to be found or stopped by Maki and Paul. Do these people seriously think that the deranged perpetrators of the sort of shootings wander around the mall doing some casual shopping first? That they’ll just agree to “remove the weapon from the property” should Maki ask them politely to do so? Perhaps the potential shooter isn’t the only deranged one here, eh?
As we saw in the Clackamas Mall and in dozens of other incidents, concealed carriers can and do stop mass shooting incidents (or would-be mass shootings) in their tracks and, concealed carrier or law enforcement, these shooters are nearly always stopped only at the point of a gun.
Do I “feel safe” knowing that these five malls in Houston are now defenseless victim zones in a state otherwise teeming with citizens who can protect themselves? Hell no. Way to paint a target on these malls by making them exactly like the other “gun free zones” where almost every single shooting of this sort in history has taken place.
Brookfield’s choice hasn’t “taken a proactive step to address the threat of gun violence” by disarming perfectly law-abiding people. It has done the polar opposite. It has created uniquely vulnerable environments in an area that is thankfully (though not for these malls) very short on those.
By Dan Zimmerman via TTAG and republished with permission.