It was only a matter of time….

“A Muslim convert who talked about his desire to wage jihad against civilians was charged Friday in a plot to set off hand grenades at a shopping mall during the Christmas rush, authorities said.

Investigators said Derrick Shareef, 22, was acting alone and never actually obtained any grenades.

“He fixed on a day of December 22nd on Friday … because it was the Friday before Christmas and thought that would be the highest concentration of shoppers that he could kill and injure,” said Robert Grant, the agent in charge of the Chicago
FBI office.”

I wrote last year about this very possibility as our mall security is generally abysmal. Where I live in South Florida there are eight major malls with thousands of shoppers all year round. Being a tourist local we have a diverse range of nationalities in the mall at any given time, so detection is more difficult than in less diverse urban areas in the country where someone who “looked different” would be eyed with greater suspicion.

Generally most mall security is amature at best, with minimum wage “watchers” who have at best a radio and a whistle and little or no profile identification training. As a matter of fact a few weeks ago I walked through a mall here and counted the people with backpacks walking around and commented to my wife, “Too easy!”

What happens in Israel in markets and buses I believe can also happen here as well. We can thank our law enforcement people for their work in preventing that from happening, but there are again still many holes to fill.

Good work on getting this slug, but we need to also address this lack of security where a “couple of grenades” could kill hundreds.

More reacts at Michelle Malkin, Wizbang