Here is the problem. Very few Americans have ever been trained for a situation like this. Unless you are Active Duty Army or Marine Corps, or a veteran of those 2 services, or a cop your 1st reaction is to get away. Americans have been conditioned to think the police will save them. They have been told that flight not fight is the best course of action. The average American has no clue what a combat situation is like.
......and if they did interfere, they'll get sued at best or prosecuted for assault at worst!!!
Excellant points. Even in Israel, where most citizens have served in the military, attacks on civilians not in a combat situation is very different.
In my previous post, I did also not mean to impugne the victims with guilt.
LOL. If you are unarmed and sitting in a movie theater when a homicidal maniac opens up on you with an AK-47 or a Glock pistol, regardless of whether you are a cop or a Marine, your basic instinct is to hit the deck and escape any way you can. It is not to charge the guy with weapon.
Then how does one explain the military personnel who were in the theater at the time? Why didn’t they stop him? Why they did end up dead?
An experiment.
With a trusted friend, or spouse or whatever, a paintball gun, a gas mask, and proper protective equipment, do the following:
Put yourself in an enclosed space, with minimal lighting (ideally, only ambient light from a television). Have your friend (or whatever), wearing a gas mask and similar protective equipment to the Aurora shooter quietly enter the room, pepper spray you, then start shooting you with the paintball gun, while you attempt to return fire with your paintball gun being more-or-less blinded.
If you add in 5 other unarmed people into your experiment, you may closely replicate the Aurora incident. When they’re running around, blinded and panicking, you will see what the theater patrons were up against.
Also consider the fact that the shooter was wearing the get-up he was, it’s entirely possible he may well have anticipated some armed resistance.
Why no one rushed him? Because no one want to get shot, that’s why. It’s called survival instinct.
If someone pulled an S&W .223 on you, and you were unarmed, and let’s say that person is 15 to 20 feet away from you, looking right at you, are you going to rush him? You wouldn’t even make it five feet before you’re filled with lead and he’s lining up another target.
In this case, the shooter had clear tactical advantages and complete control of the situation.
Because that is the fiction the cops use when they are trying to get raises. The most misunderstood fact of life is that cops don't prevent crimes, armed private citizens do. Cops get called after the fact and then attempt to find out who was responsible, and maybe they prevent the next crime from happening IF they nab the perp before he has the opportunity to do it again. Cops spend 99+% of their time investigating crimes and collecting evidence about a crime which was over and done with hours, days, weeks, months or years after the fact OR writing tickets to raise enough revenue to cover their overtime. I guess I would really like to know if there were any off duty cops in the theater and what their individual responses were.