The US certainly has a higher frequency of apparently motiveless mass murders, but I think it is fairly certain that this is due to easy access to weapons. Someone who is mentally unbalanced is probably going to kill fewer people with a knife before being stopped than with a gun.
In Japan, one mass murderer kills 8 Japanese schoolchildren with a knife. In another incident, a mass murderer kills 3 people with a truck and then killed 4 individuals on foot. They were eventually arrested and sentenced to death.
If somebody was there with a gun, they could have engage the murderer in a firefight instead of defenseless people getting knifed or getting shot.
Am I the only one who thinks it's humorous how many people think that body armor means bullets just ricochet to the ground harmlessly?
Vests are simply for preventing shots from penetrating vital organs, not turning the wearer into Iron Man. Best case scenario, it'll feel like you just got hit with a golf drive. If your ribs aren't broken, they'll be badly bruised. The weapon is negligible since it's not a firefight, if anything, armed people in the theater would have the upper hand because these killers are never expecting people to shoot back at them. Really, anybody who's ever shot a gun could have likely killed him, if not debilitated him enough such that people could escape.
There are strong arguments to both sides of gun control but alluding that handguns are insufficient protection is not one of them, that's just ignorance.
You think some person with a handgun would stand much of a chance against someone in body armor with an assault rifle?
It would not be certainty a fair fight. Even so, a murderer is forced to engage civilians who are shooting at them rather than civilians who are simply defenseless. The only thing a person with handgun can do is buy time for a SWAT team to arrive and the slower the SWAT are, the more likely for death. (See the North Hollywood shootout as an example of this)
Nonetheless, I consider the defenders having guns to be an equalizer. In the Virginia Tech massacre incident, the murderer have only two handguns, but he was able to kill 32 individuals.
Unless those civilians have been trained under live-fire circumstances, there is a far greater probability that they would add to the toll of bystander injuries than that they would quickly stop the original threat. It's not life on the target range; flinching, adrenalin tremors and tunnel vision are real, and a miss (or a through-and-through) doesn't always go safely into a sand berm. And what about the other armed individuals whose situational awareness is formed when they see two or three shooters rather than the original one?
If a psychopath wants an assault rifle, they will go to any means to obtain one, regardless of it is legal to own one wherever they live. Meanwhile, if you have unarmed police and no armed civilians, you are likely to have killers go on even more unstoppable rampages.
Additionally, killers who can't get guns will just resort to other methods of mass destruction, like our little theater shooter who had bombs and gas grenades as well. You can build a pipe bomb in your own basement with commodity supplies. Tools of destruction are cheap and always readily available.
In Japan, one mass murderer kills 8 Japanese schoolchildren with a knife. In another incident, a mass murderer kills 3 people with a truck and then killed 4 individuals on foot. They were eventually arrested and sentenced to death.
If somebody was there with a gun, they could have engage the murderer in a firefight instead of defenseless people getting knifed or getting shot.