Have we forgotten about the drive by shooting last year? The crazed man climbing Supreme Scream? Or what about the Cinco De Mayo riot?
As long as Knott's promotes itself as the cheaper alternative, these types of issues will continue. The problems are systemic. Cheaper admission is always going to mean easier access. Allowing people to be dropped off right at the entrance, with no reservation means easier access. Lower admissions costs means less money for security training and more apathy amongst their employees.
Look, if you are determined to be very upset about it, be my guest. I don't remember you being one of the ones getting very upset over the Toontown incident, so this seems maybe a bit...selective on your part. Maybe I'm misremembering, it's been awhile. But right now this doesn't seem all that different from all of those coded "well if we let the poors come the poors will cause problems" dialogues that have been happening forever and ever, usually with Six Flags but now apparently with Knott's too.
But are you really going to blame Knott's for one person clearly in need of help for deciding to climb their drop tower? Ideally they should have stopped the guy from getting to that point, but once said guy has already climbed past the point they can reach them, what are they supposed to do? Perhaps they tried and he stopped them. I don't know. Guy clearly wasn't in a rational state of mind, and there's only so much anyone can do when that happens.
Knott's entrance is right on a public road. Obviously the drive by shooting isn't ideal, but how would you have prevented such a situation? They are even more surrounded by suburbia than Disneyland is, and there is literally nowhere for them to move the park entrance that would entirely ensure that such a scenario would never happen again. There's nowhere they could put the entrance without a public road right there next to it. The only real way to do that would be to move the entrance entirely across the street, but that won't happen for lots of logistical reasons.
Disney is the only theme park company doing reservations, and I'd say it's causing them more harm and headaches (particularly in terms of guest feedback and experience) than good, so I commend Knott's for not offering reservations. No one wants reservations because they don't even do a particularly good job at dealing with the problems they purport to solve and create new problems to boot. There's a reason that no-one, pre-covid, did reservations. There's also a reason that no one except Disney is still doing reservations.
Can you prove that lower admission costs inherently result in weaker employee training and morale? Because that seems like a stretch. It's not like Disneyland employees are paid significantly more than Knott's workers are just because the admission price is significantly more expensive.
No park in the world is entirely free of the possibility of such incidents happening. It's not ideal, but that's life. Sometimes young people are bound and determined to make stupid decisions, and they decide to do it in a public place. It happens, and increasingly it happens everywhere, even in "good" places. So while the park probably could beef up its security a little bit, I think a lot of the generalizations about Knott's in this thread have less basis in fact than in some people's need to pile on the park that lets more poors in down the street from everyone's golden child, which also had a bad incident not that long ago that we've since moved on from. Just doesn't seem like we're going on rational fact and more on emotional tangents is all.
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