This incident pretty much kills the "Good guys with guns"/"Gun free zones are bad" myth. [View all]

[Tommy_Carcetti]

Here we have a crowd of several thousand people on the ground. We have a shooter several hundred feet away with either an automatic/semi-automatic gun spraying down from 32 stories up. He's situated in a hotel with hundreds of other innocent guests. It's night time.

Now, say a fraction of the crowd--maybe a couple hundred--are the prototypical "Good guy with a gun" CCW carriers who have glocks strapped to their ankles.

The ground is getting sprayed with bullets. There's chaos everywhere. Even if the people who stand up are recognized as "good guys", essentially they'd be shooting blind with a pistol from far away hoping to hit, in the dark, an unknown shooter, while also hoping to avoid innocent guests in the hotel room around said unknown shooter.

If that were the case, the Law of Unintended Consequences would probably have added a dozen or two extra fatalities to the shooting.