Yesterday I was at Phoenix Comicon when a lone gunman showed up laden with weapons and ready to kill cops. I had no idea it was happening. None. They didn’t evacuate us, tell us, or even make it all too obvious stuff was going on. By the end of the day I noticed more cops and that was that.
Today was different. The news reported the situation with the salaciousness common to American news media. He had enough guns to kill a score of people. He was hoping to ‘rack up a high score’. All of that gets people to tune in. All of that also added hours of security to the convention. By 11 am the wait to get in was close to two hours. The cops were screening everyone going in and as a result, there were thousands of people standing in a queue outside. Not A hundred or two hundred. Well over a thousand people waiting in line. Waiting with no security to protect them against the possibility of an attack. See, by securing the interior so well, the cops created a target-rich environment outside. It all felt like a brilliant plan–for the bad guys.
‘lets send in a rube to get nabbed, so we can create the conditions for a massacre soon after–one that can take advantage of the heightened media coverage. The security check was meant to do good, but quickly devolved into doing very bad. I just feel lucky things didn’t go wrong.
Some Thoughts:
- The calendar widget is unforgiving. And wrong. While it may seem as if I have missed a day here or there, in fact I still write everyday within the waking hours. Sometimes the post falls outside the boundary of the midnight hour. I ought to get better at that too.