'Die trying' doesn't save the 101 people. If anything, I'd think about the TDT-related benefits of having precommitted to not giving in to blackmail, but in this particular example it's far from clear that the king wouldn't have offered you the deal in the first place had he been sure you were going to refuse it -- though it is in most similar situations I'm actually likely to face in real life.
Two of the three actions I suggested saved 102 people (assuming that you aren't one of the 100 innocent people). Two of them are possible in the least convenient universe. Two of them are moral. Those three tradeoffs are the only ones I considered- or do you consider kicking a child in the face to be a moral act?
There is no benefit to committing to not give into blackmail in this case, except that it might reduce the chances of the scenario happening. One of the advantages to noncompliance is that it reduces the chance of the scenario recurring- can you be blackmailed into kicking any number of children with the same 100 hostages?
A Ph.D student in neuroscience shot at least 50 people at a showing of the new Batman movie. He also appears to have released some kind of gas from a canister. Because of his educational background this person almost certainly knows a lot about molecular biology. How long will it be (if ever) before a typical bio-science Ph.D will have the capacity to kill, say,a million people?
Edit: I'm not claiming that this event should cause a fully informed person to update on anything. Rather I was hoping that readers of this blog with strong life-science backgrounds could provide information that would help me and other interested readers assess the probability of future risks. Since this blog often deals with catastrophic risks and the social harms of irrationality and given that the events I described will likely dominate the U.S. news media for a few days I thought my question worth asking. Given the post's Karma rating (currently -4), however, I will update my beliefs about what constitutes an appropriate discussion post.