Yes.
What I was responding to is the claim of some of "Had I been there....." crowd. Since one could not guarantee that they would have been 'right near the guy', their claims , based on the situation, are ludicrous. In the commotion, would you risk shooting innocent bystanders ?
My big gripe was with the “he has body armor so it’s pointless to resist” flavor I got from the earlier post. I know what you mean about the “if only” Rambos out there, but I sure wish someone in that theater, other than the killer, had said “to hell with the rules.” And yes, I would probably risk it if I thought I could make the shot. There’s always the possibility of a miss or pass through, but if you think you can make the shot and the alternative is to sit by and watch others be murdered, I think I would feel almost obligated to try and stop it. Or maybe I’d run; there’s probably no way to know until you’re there. Still, unless you’re right at the exit your odds of getting plugged are pretty good anyway, so there is the element of self-preservation at work and you’d have to live with yourself either way. I don’t know if it would be harder to live with stopping an attack but killing an innocent or letting the whole thing unfold. The problem is that either way you’ll never know how it would have come out had you acted otherwise. Killing an innocent and failing to stop the attack would be pretty difficult to survive. In the end it’s too bad several people couldn’t have rushed him. It seems like there were people brave enough to take bullets trying to protect others, but they just didn’t have the means to get at the SOB.