A "ridiculous" no-gun policy at the Mall of America is creating a "killing zone" at the sprawling shopping center just as it reportedly has come into the cross-hairs of
a Somali terror group, a Minnesota GOP lawmaker says.
Gun-rights activist and state Rep. Tony Cornish complains the ban's not only dangerous, but is "completely worthless" since mall officials "have no standing" to prevent someone with a legal permit to carry a handgun in public,
the Star Tribune reports.
"This is completely ridiculous,"
Cornish tells CBS affiliate WCCO. "The complete opposite of what they should be doing. If we’re threatened with an attack, the last thing you want to do is disarm citizens."
Cornish's rage comes in the wake of a new video from the Somali jihadi group al-Shabab reportedly calling for an attack on the suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul mall as well as the West Edmonton Mall in Canada and the Oxford Street shopping area in London,
Fox News reports.
The video, narrated by a man with a British accent wearing a camouflage jacket and a kaffiyeh-type scarf hiding his face, accuses Kenyan troops in Somalia of abusing Somali Muslims, Fox reports.
Al-Shabab was responsible for the 2013 attack on Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi that killed 67 people.
The video narrator calls on Muslims to attack other shopping males in Western countries and flashes an image of the Mall of America, along with its GPS coordinates, Fox News reports.
Homeland Security Jeh Johnson says the
latest jihadi threat "reflects the new phase we've evolved to in the global terrorist threat, in that you have groups such as al-Shabab and [the Islamic State] publicly calling for independent actors in their homelands to carry out attacks."
In light of the threat, Cornish says the Mall of America's gun ban is "actually making the [mall] more unsafe than safe," the Star Tribune reports, and creating a "killing zone."
"They are stopping nothing from happening," he says.
Bryan Strawser of the Minnesota Gun Owners political action committee also decried the gun ban, saying "the current threat environment makes it unconscionable to seek to prohibit self-defense by the mall's customers," the Star Tribune reports.
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