Answer: You either shoot at the* person shooting at you*, or you resign yourself to the fact that you’ve just seen your last movie. I agree, the chances of taking down a guy in full balletic armor, in a dark theater is very small, but your actions in returning fire may have caused the shooter to duck for cover, buying a few precious seconds for a handful of people to escape.
Morgenstern, do you have bullet time powers or something? It was a nearly pitch-black theater full of smoke. It’s hard enough to tell where a round comes from even in full daylight!
- The woman who answered her cellphone during the movie.
So your answer is - you don’t attempt to intervene unless and until you are directly fired upon not at someone firing at others? No snarkiness intended.
“Give the gunman a free shot at you first” seems rather generous to me.
Or Harry Potter with his wand? Or better yet, Batman with his batarang?
Think of what a chaotic mess it normally is getting out of a theater when the movie ends, and people are motivated by nothing more urgent than the extra large coke they drank, or the need to get home and let the dog out. Yet somehow some people think that adding people panicking, climbing over and around the seats and each other, in a dark, smoke filled, theater to that, they would stand calmly among the chaos, and get off a precise shot at an armored, moving target.
Keep dreaming Ted, expelliarmus is about as intelligent and realistic a plan!
That is assuming that you see both people. I don’t think you can assume that at all.
I will accept that if exactly one person attempts to take out the gunman then the results are likely to be favorable. However, once you add in additional persons with guns in the theater things get dicey. Two might work out okay as stated in the quote, but as we add more and more innocents with guns then the benefits diminish quickly to the point that the situation looks like:
- The panicked guy with the pistol, or
- The professional dude who might be S.W.A.T. or military
- Blonde haired chick with big boobs and big gun
- Stoner guy with a bong
- Guy in suit with a gun
- Guy in a HOODIE!
- The professional dude who actually is S.W.A.T. (oh shit, hope you didn’t shoot this guy)
Don’t know, but most likely I’d be trying to dig a hole in the floor and drag the debris in behind me. If close to the shooter, I’d like to think I might try to tackle him when he stopped to reload, but I hope I never have to find out. In the military, you’re taught to assault the position in the case of an ambush so as not to present a stationary target. But that’s with a squad of trained people, not a single person with a handgun who is shaking so badly from the adrenaline that he’s unlikely to hit anything aimed at.
Too bad Pat Tillman can’t weigh in on this.
If I wasn’t being fired on, I would be concentrating on getting myself and my family to safety. Then I would do what I could to help the others escape. If I was armed, I would return fire when I had two options left, return fire or become a victim.
Edit. Responding to Tagos.
Let me ask this question.
If there had been an off-duty, armed Aurora police officer in the theater, what would you expected him to do in this situation?
One guy opens fire, then a hero pulls out his gun and starts opening fire. What are you going to think? Aha, a fellow civilian to defend the defenseless with me! or Oh shit, there’s two of them working together!
“I shoot the guy shooting at me” is so much superhero nonsense. You do realize a grunt and a red flash in the direction the shot came from only happens in video games, right? Because I can’t think of any other way to figure out how you’re being shot at in smoke.
Use common sense and police training which is a lot more than you’re gonna get from your run-of-the-mill asshole who thinks he’s Clint Eastwood.
Are the active duty military who were present run-of-the-mill assholes too?
Scootch over in the seat in between shots and use the variance in sound arrival to triangulate the location of the shooter, duh.
Or, more likely, causes the shooter to redirect the fire in your direction, killing people around you instead of across the room. Win-win for everyone, I guess.
No, but they were probably (a) unarmed and (b) trained well enough not to go shooting off guns in a crowded, dark, smoke filled movie theater.
Do you have any evidence that any of them would have fired back in a smoked filled theatre filled with panicked innocents? If not, then no.
Hve you ever seen the muzzle flash from an AR-15/M-16 at night (in a dark theater)?
Also, consider the people you might hit if you miss. Would you feel any guilt over hitting any innocent bystanders?
One of the attendees of the theater that got shot up said that pretty much the only thing he could see was the flash of the gun being fired. This guy was a guest on KFI AM 640 out of L.A. on Friday around 4 o’clock.