I Shall Now MALL NINJA!! Your Sunday

This is one of the most epic trolls I’ve ever read. It says something about our unhinged gun culture that I wasn’t sure it was a troll at first, rather than a man with a very rich fantasy life. Content note for the usual kind of sexism, fat-shaming, toxic masculinity and so forth you’d expect to find in forums full of gun-obsessed people.

Before we get to the excerpt proper, let our host ‘splain what a Mall Ninja is:

The Mall Ninja is easily distinguished by an abundance of “tactical” gear, such as fatigues, a thigh holster (with, of course, a Glock), combat boots, bandolier and other accouterments that you’d usually only see on a SWAT operative. Median age is usually 19-25, and they tend to boast about their various exploits with certain Special Forces units, all of which they’re too young and idiotic to have joined (real Special Forces types don’t brag). They typically have opinions on everything, regardless of expertise, they are uniformly poor shots, and they tend to exhibit a frightening lack of safety training.

Image shows a white dude in tactical gear, holding an enormous gun, with Security stamped on his vest and his balaclava. Caption says "Mall Ninja: Keeping America safe, one consumer at a time."

I’ve known people like this. They make me sad. Fortunately, this one is hilarious, and now thee shall have a taste of the absurdity before I send you away to enjoy the rest:

Gecko45 writes:

hello friends,

Last year I made the decision to trust my life on the street to Second Chance body armor. I got the level IIa because it stops the most rounds. plus I got the Trauma Plate for the front.

What scares me is that, although I can fit an extra trauma plate in the front, I cannot fit a second one in back. As of late I have taken to duct-taping a second trauma plate to the area of my back where the heart and vital organs are located. Then I put my vest on.

Here is the questions. The ducttape solution, although tactically sound, is hot and painful to remove. I would like to go to the single-plate solution in back. What I am worried about is repeated hits to that area with .308 ammunition. I have a high-risk security job and I fear that I would be the target for repeated long-distance shots to my back.

Are any of you aware of a thicker plate that could stop, say, .338 Lapua or something like that? Is there a better way to do the second plate?

BTW, I am, of course, usually carrying a pair of ceramic plates in my briefcase so that I can shield my head. My SO (we work as a team when necessary) has a similar accessory containing a breakdown NEF single-shot 300 WinMag with an 18″ bbl. The plan is that I shield us with my body and “catch the rounds” while she assembles the NEF. I lay down covering fire with my 23 (Bar-Sto .357 Sig barrel) and she makes the long shots. I will then throw smoke grenades to obscure the area while continuing to lay covering fire. The problem, of course, is when I have to turn my back to run, and then the problem crops up.

Thanks!

It just gets worse – or better, depending on your outlook – from there. The bit where the corporate security/espionage joins in amps up the hilarity to 11. And that’s even before they get to the Asian mafia raid on the Mortal Kombat machines… *wipes away tear* Beautiful.

I bow before their masterful trolling.

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I Shall Now MALL NINJA!! Your Sunday
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10 thoughts on “I Shall Now MALL NINJA!! Your Sunday

  1. 2

    From the linked troll:

    The HK MP5SD we tesst fired was quiet, but kept jamminng with Hydra-Shoks. The round would go “nose up” out of the magazine, and stop the bolt, and I kept having to clear the chamber. I will not buy any more HK’s because of these FTF’s

    The Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun is good enough for the French GIGN (Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale), the German GSG-9 counterterrorism group, and the British SAS but not good enough for Mall Ninja.

  2. 4

    The sad thing is, when I look at American cops, who seem to love to Mall Ninja, I realize that the people who needed to, didn’t get the joke.

    Last week I was in NYC at a conference and noticed people in US Army greens carrying sidearms in Grand Central Terminal. I assume(hope?) they were National Guard and were there legally. But the next stage in the evolution of the American Cop is to fully militarize. I bet over the next few years we’ll see cops starting to carry increasingly heavy weapons. Because … ego reasons. I was in Boston’s Logan Airport 2 years ago on the anniversary of 9/11 and there were cops there carrying silenced H&K submachine guns. Like they expected a stand-up gunfight against impossible odds, or something.

    This kind of nonsense is a serious problem. Cops should not be getting training on how to fire short, effective bursts with automatic weapons: they should be getting training on how to get away from a fight, call for back-up, and de-escalate the situation. It’s like these young idiots are reading NRA “more bullets! more firepower!” literature, instead of thinking. I asked the cop in the airport how much range-time he spent practicing with that tool, because using it wrong in a crowded departure gate area was probably a greater threat to the passengers than anything a terrorist might do and he glared at me and told me to move on if I didn’t want any trouble. I wonder if there’s any good social science research on people’s responses to challenges against their authority if they are armed or not…

  3. 7

    A quick Google search reveals the average wage of a mall cop to be about $25,000, median for deputy sheriff $40,000, meter maids ( I use the term to differentiate from meter readers, a completely different job description.) roughly $37,000.

    Mall cop, for those who couldn’t rise all the way to meter maid.

  4. 8

    Re: Marcus 4#

    I saw something similar in a UK airport a few years back. For some reason there were two police officers patrolling the baggage claim with automated rifles. And this was at a relatively small airport (all of three conveyor belts in the hall). To this day I can’t think of a reason why they’d need those officers, those weapons and, most of all, why they’d be checking out the baggage claim.
    After all, the only people in the hall would be employees and passengers who just got off a plane, which they only boarded after being hassled through security on the other end of that flight. Unless a terrorist managed to conceal weapons or explosives, get them aboard a plane and then promptly fell asleep during the flight I’m not sure why you would expect trouble there.

    In a similar vein, at some point swabs were introduced at that airport. The first time someone swabbed my luggage I reflexively asked what kind of chemical detector they were using – I have a thing for analytical instruments. The operator’s curt response was that it wasn’t a chemical detector but a bomb detector. (Paraphrased) No chemistry at all then, I guess. Security personnel are probably not meant to be too forthcoming about their equipment but I sometimes wonder if this wasn’t another case of people not understanding their own tools. Security involves more than just firearms, and even there have been some … lapses.

  5. 9

    The operator’s curt response was that it wasn’t a chemical detector but a bomb detector.

    They’re almost certainly only looking for nitrate compounds. Which kind of makes sense because nitrates are what makes a lot of explosives explodey.

    This is a real pain for those of us who live on farms and are sometimes near fertilizer. It’s worse for me; as an amateur photographer who does wet plate ambrotypes (Fox Talbot’s process from the 1850s) I often have silver nitrate or nitrocellulose on my clothes. I’ve had to keep a complete separate stack of clothing that lives in my darkroom. Because if you tell the security robot, “Oh, that? That’s probably a bit of nitrocellulose on my hand…” they will handcuff you and point guns at you, in the US. It’s not fun.

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