On November 7, 2018, a shooting at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, by former Marine Ian David Long left nearly a dozen people dead, including the shooter. 

One victim, Sgt. Ron Helus, it was revealed recently, was killed not by Long but instead “friendly fire” from another police officer’s gun in the chaos. Dozens more were injured, mostly while escaping the club.

It was the latest horrific mass shooting, and Dann Broadbent, a science communicator, writer, and cohost of A Science Enthusiast podcast, examined it on his website. Broadbent wrote, “It was the 307th mass shooting this year (today is the 312th day of this year, too). This is our new normal. We consider ourselves to be better than the rest of the world, yet we have more gun violence per capita than any other developed country in the world.”

There are a few things we could unpack in this comment. In a future article I’ll examine the seeming epidemic of mass shootings, but in a previous column I wrote about concerns that Americans are numb, that mass shootings are becoming so routine and “the new normal” that citizens have lost their ability to be outraged.

What caught my eye was this comment: “I watched videos of the shooting last night. I heard the gunshots. But I didn’t hear people screaming, because we as a society now know that in an active shooter situation, you don’t scream because that draws extra attention to you. You get down, and look for ways to get out as quickly as possible.”

That seemed like a strange—and improbable—aspect of the attacks. No one screamed as a self-described “insane” maniac shot people in the nightclub? Everyone was silent (well, as silent as a country music nightclub would be) and careful not to yell or make a noise lest he or she draw attention?

After the attack had begun, of course, the circumstances would change. Potential victims hiding and staying silent in the presence of enemies with weapons is nothing new; it’s been a defensive tactic for millennia and was described in accounts of the Columbine school shootings in 1999. But perhaps in today’s world where shootings seem common, people in the Borderline Bar really did have the savvy and self-control to keep silent during the attack.

I didn’t follow the news coverage that closely, but I saw and read many interviews with survivors, none of whom mentioned an eerie silence from the killer’s potential victims.

Instead they described chaos: people yelling, screaming, and shouting. One victim, Bryce Colvard, described his friends shouting at him to get down; another student, Teylor Whittler, said that during the shooting “Everyone just yelled, ‘Run, he’s coming!’” and so on. Multiple news reports described victims screaming and yelling.

It got me wondering why someone would think or assume that the club’s victims were silent during such a terrifying scene. Where did that odd bit of misinformation come from? Broadbent referenced his source: the video he watched of the shooting in which “I didn’t hear people screaming …You can watch one of the videos yourself, but I must warn you that it’s extremely disturbing.”

Tale of the Tape

I watched the one-minute video he linked to, posted (and presumably taken) by Dallas Knapp on Instagram, from inside the club. Loud gunfire can be clearly heard, as can breaking glass and some indistinct sounds.

The video is dark and unclear; at first glance I had initially thought it was taken outside the club. It shows a chaotic scene and a dark, empty dance floor. A man is seen in the background, but it’s not clear if it’s the shooter, a victim, or a police officer. The cameraman turns and runs, exiting the building moments later.

Chicago’s ABC 7 News described the video: “The video shows what appears to be a semi-empty dance floor as a man dressed in dark clothing is behind a counter-like wall and shooting. About 10 gunshots are heard in the video. The man taking the video runs out of the venue and yells, ‘Guys, run, he’s coming out this door!’ Several people are heard screaming in the distance.”

It’s not just Broadbent of A Science Enthusiast who remarked on the video and noted there was something odd about it. In fact, myriad conspiracy theorists watched the same video and suggested that the shooting was a hoax, a “false flag” operation. A sampling of these opinions can be found in the responses to the video linked to within a CNN report:

• “I don’t see anyone except one man not running but casually behind in the next room and the camera man. There would be people running all over the place and people on the ground.”
• “THE ROOM WAS EMPTY!!! LET THAT SINK IN PEOPLE!!! YOU ARE BEING PLAYED!!!”
• “You’re telling me a club with hundreds of people and an active shooter was quiet enough for the microphone to CLEARLY pick up the sounds of glass breaking and not be drowned out by the sounds of panic?”
• “Either THAT VIDEO was staged independently of the actual incident where people may have truly been injured or it’s ALL bullshit.”
• “WTF did I just watch? A video of an empty bar and then audio of gunshots. What happened to the 100s of people who were supposedly partying and line dancing? Where was all the mayhem that ensued afterwards? What, no one screaming? No one diving for cover on the floor. No stampede for the doorways and no one throwing chairs through windows? Oh my how horrific this video is indeed. It seems to contradict the eyewitness accounts. I’m calling BS.”

The last conspiracy poster’s comment reflects Broadbent’s observation: “What, no one screaming? … It seems to contradict the eyewitness accounts.” It’s a fair and accurate statement, so what can we make of it?

The Video versus the Victims: What’s Going On?

We can examine this through the lens of critical thinking, science, and skepticism. On one hand we have dozens of eyewitnesses who described the horror they saw and heard, including shouting and screaming; on the other hand, we have a short, ambiguous video clip that, superficially, seems to contradict them.

In fact there’s no contradiction: Eyewitnesses, such as Holden Harrah interviewed on the Today Show, stated that Long appeared at the door and immediately began shooting people. News reports state that the attacker fired at least sixty rounds; of those, about nine or ten can be heard in the video. Thus, we are seeing about one-sixth of the number of shots fired, with the balance coming before and/or after the video was recorded.

The dance floor is largely (or entirely) empty when the video was recorded because by that point the shooting had been going on for some time; it only takes a few seconds to clear a small dance floor. The room is very dark, and no victims can be seen; if there are any, they’re hiding behind tables or are in other rooms or are already outside. It’s true that in that video clip there’s no loud screaming, since the place is mostly empty at that point; few if any of the fifty or so patrons originally in the main room were left. There were reportedly about 200 people on the premises, including cooks, staff, people in other rooms, etc., most of whom fled in other directions and never directly encountered the shooter; the video depicts Knapp moving from the dance floor to the exit in seconds.

No music can be heard in the clip either—not because no music was being played that night at the nightclub but because the music, like the screaming, ceased soon after the shooting began. There’s nothing unusual or suspicious about it. We would not expect to hear people screaming in that room for the same reason we would not expect to see a full dance floor.

It’s like watching video taken by a driver after a car accident and finding it curious or suspicious that the footage doesn’t show the entire event before the cars collided. Why would it? Just because we don’t see some specific aspect of an event in a short video clip of that event doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Conspiracy theorists find it suspicious that more videos of the shooting have not been made public. It seems likely that most of the victims that night were too busy running or hiding to pull out their cell phones and record the events; that one person did isn’t particularly surprising.

There are likely additional videos from police body cameras and security systems that have been reviewed by police but may not be made public. Since the suspect is dead, there will be no criminal trial and no necessary reason to release them.

In fact just recently, after a protracted legal battle by journalists at The Hartford Courant, police released documentation about Adam Lanza, the shooter in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre—six years after the conspiracy-laden event.

Authorities are not legally obligated to release any and all information about a crime simply to satisfy the morbidly curious and conspiracy theorists. (And, of course, such videos will not satisfy the conspiracy minded: “Yeah, so if this is real, why wasn’t this video released right away? FAKE!!!”)

Anyone can make mistaken assumptions; we all do it. It’s not a question of believing the victims or believing the video; we can do both if we examine the evidence closely—and we must be careful not to create contradictions where none exist, because those are the building blocks of conspiracies.