Murder or suicide?

Well what do you all say? Survivors like Stanley Clayton and Tim Carter, backed by Tim Reiterman and others claim that events on November 18 should be labelled suicide. Tim Carter cite unconfirmed details about gunshot wounds and wounds from crossbows.

On the opposite side, researcher Mary McCormick Maaga claim that it was a mass suicide, there were no physical coercion, Maaga cites Stephan Jones, who wasn't there, and claims that the able bodied adults could easily escape. Survivor Grover Davis supposedly said that he walked up to a guard and said he didn't want to die, the guard told him to "have a good life".

Neither side is really that convincing, common sense seem to say suicide, people would have been shot if there was physical coercion, but no such deaths have been reported. In Raven by Tim Reiterman there seems to have been only one report of an unidentified male shot outside the pavillion.

But when you look at the stories told by Odell Rhodes and Stanley Clayton in particular, Jim Jones needed to go out into the audience and drag people to the vat, with Jim McElvane literally carrying a man. People who tried to leave were turned back by armed guards. To me that doesn't sound like people were prepared to die willingly, Rhodes on the other hand said that people were "in a trance".

Then you have the death tape, an edited tape of 45 minutes of what must have taken around two hours, people seem to agree on suicide, but did they really understand it was for real? Once they saw dissenters like Christine Miller shouted down and ultimately forcibly injected, who would dare to speak up?

Could people, the able-bodied adults really escape that easily? Would an able-bodied man really be prepared to leave his family to die? Stanley's wife had died, so he had no family to leave, I don't think Odell Rhodes had family there, but many others would have, even if it was easy to escape, would people really abonden their children and wives and grandparents?