
A gunman opened fire with an AR-style rifle in a commercial parking lot near the In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho on Saturday afternoon. Three people are dead. Several more are injured. An employee was shot in the chest.
Then a civilian with a handgun stepped into the parking lot and started shooting back.
The video from the scene shows the armed citizen engaging the shooter in a firefight — a guy with a pistol going up against a rifle because nobody else was going to do it. Twin Falls Police Chief Matthew Hicks confirmed the civilian's involvement, stating officers are "working to try to ascertain his identity and the motivations behind" the shooting.
Hicks told reporters, "We believe that the threat to the community is over." It's over because someone who was carrying decided that watching people die in a parking lot wasn't an option.
Witness Lane Koehn was on the scene and described seeing one of the victims. "She was pretty bad off, but I don't know. I hope she made it," Koehn said. Paramedics responded and transported the injured. Three people didn't make it home Saturday night.
The details are still coming in. Chief Hicks confirmed the gunman "was nearby on the scene" and that the investigation is active. What we do know is that an armed civilian closed the distance between a pistol and a rifle and engaged.
Every time something like this happens, the same conversation starts. We hear about how more guns mean more violence. We hear about how civilians aren't trained for these situations. We hear about how the only answer is legislation that would have left every person in that parking lot with nothing but a phone to dial 911 on.
Twin Falls isn't a war zone. It's a mid-size Idaho city where people go to In-N-Out for a burger on a Saturday afternoon. The gunman chose it anyway. And the only thing standing between that rifle and more casualties was one person who was carrying and decided to act.
The question nobody on the gun-control side wants to answer is simple: how many would be dead if that parking lot had been a gun-free zone?


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