I'm certainly not encouraging armed individuals in a crowd to do anything. My point was that having a significant number of armed people in a crowd like that makes finding a shooter that much more difficult. I am not surprised the wrong person was grabbed. It could've been much worse.

I misunderstood you then. I wholeheartedly agree with you.

Even so, most folks who carry prefer concealed carry for tactical reasons, one of which being that unless you have your rifle in a ready position, its not very useful in a self-defense situation, and simply marks you as "shoot this one first". And it turns out that walking around with a rifle in a ready position is generally perceived as aggressive, regardless of actual intent, even by those comfortable with firearms (consider a police officer approaching with a holstered weapon vs one in their hand).

So in the context of this shot, it ought to be relatively easy to pick out the shooter in the moment, the problem is that a ~200m radius around the tent where Kirk was speaking covers a lot of territory, and that's a lot of ground to cover effectively without obviously interfering with students' free movement about their college campus.

The shot was clearly with a long gun (a rifle). There’s no way to make a shot at 200 yards with a hand gun (okay yes it’s possible, but disqualifyingly difficult and unlikely). And nobody concealed carries a long gun because it’s not physically possible.