Quick correction - it was the North Hollywood shooting where the cops got rifles from local gun stores. The Tower shooting incident was where the civilian riflemen kept the lunatic pinned down until two policemen and one shotgun-carrying civilian could get up to the top of the tower and shoot Whitman at close range.
The North Hollywood shootout changed a lot of doctrine....as noticed by all the officers carrying AR15s today.
I personally think the North Hollywood shooting was one of the “worst” shootings in our history. Not in terms of number killed (which I’ve decided is not a good way to measure the events, since that seems to be simply a matter of will of the shooter), but because of the sheer terror factor.
Knowing the police had the guys surrounded, but that they could do nothing to stop them, that civilians who had been shot couldn’t be rescued, that the gunmen owned the street, that’s just scary. Like “Terminator” scary.
In this shooting, we can speculate that one student with a gun could have stopped this guy. In NHollywood, we had police with guns and they could do nothing.