Let me be the first to say that this shows the importance of assault weapons. 8 guys with scoped rifles are outgunned by one man with a junk SKS.
No wonder every military on the planet arms most of their troops with self-loading rifles.
And when some folks say "we don't need battle rifles to defend liberty, because I am a crack shor with my scoped sniper rifle", we can just point to this incident and ask how good bolt rifles are against one man with an SKS.
Of course, the real problem is that the victims never shifted mental state into combat, probably just wondering what the heck is going on, and not considering shooting back.
This is the crux, and a fine example of the importance of situational awareness and being able to move rapidly through the OODA loop that fighter pilots train for. In a rapidly escalating situation the sequence of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act always puts the defender at a disadvantage because the attacker is already in Act mode. For hunters, gunfire isn't necessarily a threatening input, and no doubt the Orient and Decide phase was too slow. Damn shame as this will be used to disparage both hunting and semi-autos among the sheeple.
He chased them down over a distance of 200 yards - it appears they were fleeing because they were unarmed.
This doesn't say anything about the relative merits of bolt action vs. semi auto. Just that most of us don't expect to encounter unalloyed evil as we're going about our daily business.
Reports I've read indicate that the second group did not come armed. Why, I don't know.