> Hmmm... Which person do I engage? Maybe the guy with
> the rifle, down in front of the screen, who is facing
> the audience, shooting everyone, with a clearing around
> him?
Imagine every person in the theater was packing. They all pull out their weapons. Through the smoke and the dark, which is the good guy, which is the bad guy? Just shoot everyone that has a gun?
You may be assuming that 'guns' are the only added factor.
What appears to happen is that people who carry on a routine basis are more aware that they _are_ carrying and act accordingly.
It's a theater. The good guys are in stadium seating, the bad guy is in front.
It's a perfect setup for that kind of a thing - everyone is carrying a weapon, everyone keeps their seat, fires over the heads of the row in front. Problem solved.
But in reality, guys like this never pick an armed crowd of people. They never show up at the police station, never at a gun show, at an NRA convention, never at a shooting range.
I submit if everyone were armed at the theater he would have gone somewhere else.
Right now most of the people that are packing legally concealed weapons are generally people that are obsessive about their guns and practice a lot (and generally take them seriously).
If everyone started carrying concealed weapons, that would be another story.
Everyone drives. Yet only a small minority truly panic when something bad happens on the road. Most of us turn into a skid, slow down in wet conditions.
Any road - absent something mind-bendingly drastic, I don't see more than a small minority of people carrying daily.
