It'll be a while before we hear anything so knuckleheaded about the shootings. The fact that Colorado has these laws is evidence that they don't stop all massacres. (UPDATE: Really important note—these theaters didn't allow weapons inside.) What massacres can they stop? Well, in April—in Aurora—Kiarron Parker went on a shooting spree during a church service. He was stopped after an off-duty cop, Antonio Milow, pulled his concealed weapon and killed him. Gohmert recalls the 2005 incident in Tyler when Mark Allen Wilson saw a man, David Hernandez Arroyo, in a stand-off outside of a courthouse; Wilson disrupted the crime by shooting him.

Let's compare.

Kiarron Parker. He entered an open space (the church) during daylight hours and moved around the building looking for victims. He was shot by an off-duty cop with training unavailable to the average bystander.

David Hernandez Arroyo. He wasn't stopped until he was outside the courthouse—another open space in daylight. The hero heard the shooting while in another building, came over, and got the drop on Arroyo.

James Holmes. He wore a bulletproof vest, helmet, and gask mask, and entered a movie theater that was playing The Dark Knight Rises—so the room was dark and loud. He tossed a "gas canister" that went off and would have obscured the vision of anyone looking back at him. From the AP:

They saw a silhouette of a person in the haze near the screen, pointing a gun at the crowd and then shooting.

"There were bullet (casings) just falling on my head. They were burning my forehead," Jennifer Seeger said, adding that the gunman, dressed like a SWAT team member, fired steadily, stopping only to reload.

"Every few seconds it was just: Boom, boom, boom," she said. "He would reload and shoot and anyone who would try to leave would just get killed."

You've got dark, panic, an enclosed space, and some kind of painful gas. No one's in any position to get the jump on the shooter. No one has a place to hide from him—he has a perfect vantage point of every seat. And he's wearing protective gear.

So, I think the answer for Gohmert is: No. No one was in an ideal position to pull a Dirty Harry on the man shooting at him/her in a panicked theater.