“Out of 300 gay men in the club, none charged the shooter during his many, many reloads.”
I’ll bet that not every single person in that bar was gay. He apparently said that he had a bomb or suicide vest and that may have affected people’s thinking. Maybe “he will run out of ammo”, “he won’t get me”, or “I’ll make a run for it” or “the police will burst through the door at any moment” was running through people’s minds.
Psychologists will probably be analyzing this incident for a long, long time. Personally, I’d like to believe that 50 people throwing beer bottles all at once at the guy would have overwhelmed him and he could have been overpowered. But what the exact situation was inside is unknown.
I’m sure that the SWAT teams, etc are also having second thoughts here. But it is not uncommon in the Mideast to draw authorities in with some incident and then explode a bomb. But I will say, that three hours is a long time and why did we buy them all of those cool toys and give them all of those legal powers if they are afraid to actually use them.
This situation is something like the Russian theater incident, where their SWAT/military teams actually had to kill some civilians in order to save more and kill the terrorists. But the Russian attitude is that the people in that situation are already dead and any that can be saved is a victory.
It’s totally shocking to me that they waited 3 hours. After Columbine and Bataclan, the first cops are just supposed to charge in. Waiting even 1/2 hour for a four-cop team to assemble means mass casualties. The first cop or cops to arrive just GO!!!!! This attempt to disrupt the shooter will have a better outcome than waiting outside for the perfect SWAT team to arrive and get ready.
Seems like the alcohol factor on a Saturday night might have given someone the extra gumption to rush him. OTOH, maybe someone did and got mowed down.