I'm not buying it at all. I doubt seriously that the presence of armed citizens slowed down the identification of the shooter much, if any at all.
I've seen a lot of Walmart surveillance footage over the years and worked with some of the operators in several stores. It's no big chore for them to isolate activity occurring in a given part of one of their stores. The gear they use is on par with that of casinos, and the stores are generally much better lighted.
Like one poster here already said, if they are looking at someone with a gun after the shooting, given their actions and proximity to the event, a pretty quick look is going to tell the tale if they are involved in the criminal violence.
Add to the mix that Walmart has at the corporate level, their "global security", people. Real pros, who bring their expertise to the aid of Law Enforcement right quick. I've actually seen one of them sitting here in Oklahoma, showing us near real time images of a west coast store, and producing from the same computer, images of sales slips for items purchased by suspects he'd just shown us.
I've no doubt that a police spokesman said something about these armed citizens being a factor. What else would a talking head say to media in a PC, mile high major city like Denver? However, the article chose to quote vary sparingly as they crafted this notion around very few actual words of the police spokesman. The longest quote in the article was in reference to the fluidity of the situation. Feels like manipulated, fake news, spoon fed to an audience that by and large knows no better and more than willing to accept what a, "respected", news organization gives them.
FWIW, the real story should be that in a major city,out of millions of people, cops had this animal identified in five hours and arrested in about fourteen hours of the event. Pretty darn good police work. And hardly, "trigger happy", at all.
