A few things to mention:

For folks out of the USA, those army uniforms you see in Marathon pictures aren't regular army. They were National Guard, commonly called "weekend warriors" here. They were hired by the state government to assist in crowd control (and probably counted as a duty day for the Guard members). A few at the front of the rush into the scene weren't on duty at all - they had just run (or trotted or marched) the 26 miles in uniform with 35 pound packs as a fundraiser for a veterans' group.


On another note, I don't often visit the sites Songwronger linked to. I was frustrated a bit by the fact that when they write an extensive critique of another site (like the NY Times) there's no link to the original site. I'm no internet wizard, but even I can do that. I have to think that the socialist site doesn't want to muddy the stream of criticism by inviting the reader to form his/her own opinion.

And I'm sure there's lots of investigation about all that gunfire going on right now, especially since the suspect apparently didn't have a gun by the time of the final confrontation. I don't expect to hear any results of police inquiry for several months - they have hundreds of bullets to account for, and inquiries of that sort usually try to account for each bullet fired. The process of inquiry, however, I expect to be out of public view.