Earl,
I'd like to thank you for a very useful article, organizing the accounts of the various purported shootings. I think you could go further into the putative shots during the launching of Collapsible C. In particular I think you might look more closely at the accounts of Woolner, Thayer, Gracie and Lightoller.
Three of them agree to shots (sort of--Woolner testifies initially to seeing 'two flashes of a pistol in the air', and Gracie only reports what he heard from Lightoller, who does not claime to having fired shots or heard shots fired). In many other respects however--what boat was involved, who fired the shots, where the witness was when it occurred, etc.-- the testimony of each is both confusing, self-contradictory, contradictory to the others, and lastly, contradictory to the testimony of many other witnesses. It would be nice to sort it all out, so that one could come to more definitive conclusions.
As to the question of whether there was a 'panic' brought about by Third Class men rushing the lifeboats, I don't think your findings corroborate such a view.
If you read Lowe's account of his own shooting carefully it was aimed at preventing individual men from jumping into the lifeboat as it was being lowered. When Lowe was asked for details he mentions 2 men who tried to enter the boat 'illegally'. Jumping into a boat once it was launched was how a large proportion of men who survived (e.g. Beesley) apparently entered boats. Thayer and Lightoller also suggest the same reason why there was a problem in loading some boat(s) at the forward end.
The point is there is no indication here of a 'panic', but rather it would seem of individual desperate men who tried as best they could to save their lives as time was running out.
DG