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Let's try out the counterfactual: the assailant pulls out a rifle, aims it into the crowd, and nobody else in the immediate vicinity is armed. What happens next?
There's a small chance he was just trying to scare people and disrupt the protest, but that sounds like the prelude to a mass shooting to me. It's likely many more people would have died in that case. We can't know of course and neither could the security volunteer; he had to make a hard decision in a split second in an emergency. He had to weigh the risk of shooting when he did against the risk of waiting, and he had the disadvantage of fighting a rifle with a pistol; it's much easier to shoot accurately with a rifle, and the ammunition is more deadly.
The dude with the rifle was running. That whole argument is fine when someone is draw weapons and making threats, but they shot at someone trying to flee the scene after causing no harm and killed an innocent. Everything else is imaginary justification.
EDIT: Wondering where the hell everyone else got so much more information, I reloaded the article, scrolled past the ad wall and found the rest of the text, which makes clear that the dude with the rifle pulled his gun into a firing position on the crowd. Fair enough, I was wrong and the citizen was right to have taken the shot. I blame the ad wall for convincing me that the news article was over.
According to the reports I've read, including in the toplevel article here, the sequence of events is:
It's easy to conflate running with fleeing, but running toward a group of people with a rifle pointed at them is charging, not fleeing.
He was running ... TOWARDS the crowd.
That explains the confusion. Do you need a recommendation for an ad blocker?
Apparently using an adblocker and reading an entire article is American exceptionalism now.