1. Black Friday in a mall — and then shots are fired
On November 28 (local time), around 5 p.m., one of the largest malls in the Bay Area — Westfield Valley Fair — was packed with people out for Black Friday deals and dinner.
At the busiest, brightest, most “it-should-be-safe” moment,
an argument broke out inside the mall, and someone pulled out a gun and opened fire.
From what’s publicly known so far:
- The shooting took place near the Macy’s area
- A man got into a dispute with the gunman
- The gunman shot at him, and two nearby women (one of them a 16-year-old girl) were hit as well
- All three were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries
Police are calling it a targeted dispute, not a random mass shooting — but the shooter is still at large.
Eyewitness videos and interviews are all describing the same scene:
“Suddenly a huge crowd started sprinting toward us.
I heard a few gunshots, and then everyone rushed into the stores and pulled the gates down.”
No one is saying:
“At that moment, I calmly took out my phone and opened the SOS feature.”
2. When you’re running for your life, your hands are busy keeping you alive — not opening an app
We’ve all seen these tutorials:
- “In danger? Turn on your phone’s SOS feature.”
- “Press the power button a few times to auto-dial 112 / 911.”
- “Open this emergency app and tap the big red button.”
All of that looks very reasonable when you’re sitting on your sofa.
But if you look at the actual footage from this mall shooting, reality looks more like this:
- Crowds suddenly sprinting from one end of the corridor
- People grabbing their kids or their partner’s hand and just running
- Someone falling, scrambling back up, too scared to even look back
- Store staff shouting “Get in! Get in!” and then slamming the metal gate down
What are your hands doing at that moment?
- One hand is pulling someone you care about
- The other is bracing on door frames, grabbing railings, pushing open glass doors
- Shopping bags, backpacks, coats all turn into dead weight — you just want to get into any space where you can hide
You are absolutely not in the mood, or have the bandwidth, to:
- Fish out your phone
- Unlock it
- Hunt for where the SOS feature is hidden in Settings
- Double-check “Did I press the right thing?”
In that moment you have only one thought left:
Get away from that direction.
3. After you’ve been shot, it’s even less possible to complete any “operation flow”
Go one step further. Imagine you’re not just “present at the scene”, but you:
- Get hit by a stray bullet
- Are knocked down and trampled
- Or tumble down stairs in the chaos
What you can do, shrinks instantly.
In this mall incident, at least two of the three people who were shot were bystanders caught in the line of fire.
In that instant of being hit, it could look like this:
- A bullet to the leg — you can barely move, and the pain makes it hard even to speak
- A wound to the torso or arm — you can’t even lift your hand properly
- Heavy blood loss — your head spins, your vision darkens, your awareness drifts
Now go back and read those tutorial steps:
- “Open your phone and tap XX feature.”
- “Enter your unlock code.”
- “Select your emergency contacts.”
- “Tap confirm to send.”
To be blunt:
That’s just not going to happen.
In a real scene like this, those steps are nothing but armchair theory.
4. We like to believe “if something happens, I’ll press it” — reality looks very different
In our heads, we often picture a neat scenario:
“If something really happens, I’ll immediately grab my phone, press SOS, and wait for rescue.”
But whether it’s this Black Friday mall shooting,
or past nightclub shootings, train station attacks —
the actual footage almost always looks like this:
- Some people don’t even see what happened; they just run with the crowd
- Some hide inside shops, behind counters, in restrooms, shaking with their heads down
- Some use their phones in brief quiet moments — to tell family they’re safe, not to “activate some feature”
This isn’t because you’re cowardly, or unprepared.
It’s because humans are wired this way — survival first, everything else later.
I’ve had one very vivid experience myself:
I was volunteering in Hualien, shoveling mud after floods,
and suddenly someone yelled, “Water’s coming, run!”
Everyone just instinctively turned and sprinted.
In that moment, nobody was thinking:
- “Is this the optimal direction?”
- “Where is the safest route?”
- “Should I turn on some emergency function first?”
Your brain is down to two words: just run.
5. The real question isn’t “how to teach people to press”, but “what happens when they can’t press at all?”
So instead of making another hundred infographics about “how to turn on SOS”,
I think the more important question is:
If in those truly dangerous seconds, a person cannot operate their phone at all,
what happens in the next few minutes or even hours?
Is there anything that will automatically say, “Something’s wrong with me”?
This has nothing to do with which brand, which platform, or which app you use.
The key is whether the system is built to kick in after the person is incapacitated,
not only when they are able to act manually.
It might look like this:
- Your daily routine and movement patterns look a certain way
- One day you’re in a large public space, and suddenly you stop moving for a long time, and your phone isn’t being used at all
- The system isn’t waiting for you to “press”; instead it:
- Detects the anomaly itself
- Sends your last known location plus “something might be wrong” to trusted contacts you chose
- If the network was down at that moment, it sends that information once the connection is back
This mechanism will not stop a bullet.
It can’t guarantee that you’ll make it home alive.
But what it can do is shorten that deadly window of time when:
“Your family has no idea you’re in trouble,
and no idea where you were last seen.”
For many emergencies,
those few hours are exactly what separates life from death.
6. If you won’t open SOS while running, and can’t unlock your phone after you’re shot — what can we do?
You can treat this mall shooting as just another U.S. news story.
Or you can treat it as a reminder:
- First reminder:
Stop assuming, “If something happens, I’ll be able to press that button.”
There’s a very high chance you simply won’t have the time or strength. - Second reminder:
Think ahead, while things are normal: If something happens to me in a crowded place with limited exits,
who will know?
How will they know?
Will they be able to find me at all?
The point is not to make you live in constant fear.
It’s to use calm days to prepare a bit more for that worst-case moment.
Because when you’re truly running for your life,
your hands will be pulling the people you love, pushing that door, grabbing that railing.
No one, in that exact second,
is going to open Settings and slowly search for where SOS is hidden.
7. What SafeGuard is actually doing: not “another button”, but filling the gap when people can’t press anything
By now it’s probably clear:
What kills people isn’t always a lack of tools.
It’s that people physically can’t use those tools anymore.
What SafeGuard is doing is very simple to describe:
It tries to fill the gap where
“the person is unconscious, overwhelmed, or physically unable to operate their phone”
using automation.
It’s not here to replace 112 / 911,
and it’s not a magic shield.
It’s meant to quietly cover a few very common, but often ignored, situations:
- Severe impact during driving or at high speed
SafeGuard monitors speed and G-force in the background.
When it detects a likely accident, it automatically starts a countdown and then triggers a help-request flow. - Unusually long periods with no phone interaction
It doesn’t freak out just because you took a nap.
You define a window like “if I don’t interact with my phone at all during this time…”,
and the system treats that as a possible emergency signal:
first a loud alarm asking you to respond,
then escalation to contacting your trusted people if you still don’t react. - Staying too long in a place that doesn’t make sense for you
Your usual life circle is relatively stable.
If one day your phone remains in a strange location for a long period with no interaction,
SafeGuard treats that as a risk state and sends your location and a short explanation via SMS to the contacts you picked.
All detection and decisions are done on the device, locally.
What actually goes out, in the end, is just:
- An SMS (“I might be in trouble” + a location link)
- A phone call (to the emergency contact you chose yourself)
No cloud dashboard.
No mysterious server watching you.
No one gets to “view your location” unless you set them as trusted and SafeGuard has a real reason to send that alert.
When it comes to incidents like a mall shooting,
SafeGuard cannot:
- Prevent the shooting from happening
- Magically help you dodge a bullet
What it can do is something more honest:
If, for any reason, you collapse, are incapacitated,
and your phone has been sitting there untouched,
during that window when you yourself can’t do anything at all,
it helps send “something’s wrong” to the people you trust.
In those seconds when you’re running, you won’t open SOS.
In the moment you’re shot, you can’t even unlock your phone.
SafeGuard exists precisely because of that reality —
to let the system take over where human ability stops.
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