Luckily for everyone, the odds of the US actually becoming a dictatorship and us actually having to test this are nearly nonexistent.
In some people's opinions, America is already a dictatorship under the guise of capitalism. Furthermore, those opinions state that America is ruled by commercial interests via political lobbying from industries such as the oil industry, defense industry and so forth.
A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual: a dictator. It has three possible meanings:
1. A Roman dictator was the incumbent of a political office of legistrate of the Roman Republic. Roman dictators were allocated absolute power during times of emergency. Their power was originally neither arbitrary nor unaccountable, being subject to law and requiring retrospective justification. There were no such dictatorships after the beginning of the 2nd century BC, and later dictators such as Sulla and the Roman Emperors exercised power much more personally and arbitrarily.
2. A government controlled by one person, or a small group of people. In this form of government the power rests entirely on the person or group of people, and can be obtained by force or by inheritance. The dictator(s) may also take away much of its peoples' freedom.
3. In contemporary usage, dictatorship refers to an autocratic form of absolute rule by leadership unrestricted by law, constitutions, or other social and political factors within the state.
As bolded above, and considering the state of censorship, TSA, etc currently limiting and taking away freedoms... it could easily be argued that America falls under the category of a government controlled by a small group of people, i.e. corporations.
Let me ask you a question: Do you truly believe your vote counts?
And second: Do you fear your government, or does your government fear you?
Back to the original topic:
What happened was a tragedy, but the individual involved clearly had planned this ahead of time. If the reports are true, he was a Ph.D candidate that was withdrawing from school. It is obvious he was in a bad state of mind and his motives IMO at least had nothing to do with politics, gun control, violence in movies or any other agendas. I think he was mentally unstable, and decided to lash out violently and possibly either go on a spree or choose suicide by cop. Since he had tactical gear, he was still capable of thinking in terms of self-preservation, which puts him in a category of probably anger issues or such. I doubt we will ever know the reasons, if there are any, that explain why he did what he did.
All we can do is extend support to the victims, and try to remember that the killer is also a victim. Something put him in his state of mind to do this horrible act, and until we as a society can recognize people approaching this point, we still have learning to do.