One of the important safety lessons that non-experts could take from this story is that protective eyewear for lasers can be highly specific to the kind of laser (as lasers have only a single wavelength, the eyewear may be designed to filter out that specific wavelength rather than attenuate light-in-general). I once knew this but had forgotten it, and some of the people in the story apparently never knew it.

Also the mirror and low-divergence thing are so scary. Much like laser microphones! We have a pretty deep human intuition that other people must be at least somewhat close by in order to harm us, and lasers break that intuition.