Saturday. August 1st. Two twenty-nine in the afternoon, Mountain time.
A brand-new In-N-Out on Blue Lakes Boulevard North in Twin Falls, Idaho. The place had been open for exactly EIGHT DAYS. Busy shopping plaza, Saturday lunch rush, hundreds of people in the area. Kids in the back seat. Drive-thru line wrapped around the building the way it always is at a new one.
Three people are dead. Seven more were shot. Two of them were still in critical condition Sunday afternoon. One of the dead was an employee who clocked in that morning to make somebody a burger.
And before the coroner had finished, before a single family had been notified, before the police chief had even said the shooter’s name out loud, the same people who have been running the same play since Columbine were back on your timeline demanding GUN CONTROL.
Fine.
Let us talk about control. I teach physics for a living. I know precisely what that word means, and I promise you it does not mean what you think it means.
— PART ONE: WHAT IS ACTUALLY CONFIRMED, AND WHAT I AM NOT GOING TO PRETEND I KNOW —
I am going to do something almost nobody on the internet did this weekend. I am going to tell you only what has actually been established.
CONFIRMED. Twin Falls Police Chief Matthew Hicks identified the shooter as 24-year-old Chad Williams. CONFIRMED. Williams died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. CONFIRMED. Investigators believe he acted alone. CONFIRMED, and this is the part that matters, an off-duty Idaho State Police trooper AND an armed private citizen BOTH returned fire at him. Police say that is what drove him off the scene and stopped it from getting worse. The Twin Falls County Sheriff called them true heroes and said their actions saved lives. The chief said essentially the same thing at the podium.
Now here is what is NOT confirmed. Watch how many accounts told you otherwise inside of four hours.
The motive. Unknown. Still under investigation. The FBI is assisting. The shooter’s family is cooperating with police, and the chief noted that their hearts are broken too, which is a sentence a lot of people online could stand to sit with for a minute.
The identity of the armed citizen. Not confirmed by any law enforcement agency. There is a name trending. It might even be the right one. I am not printing it, and here is exactly why. During that same press conference, Chief Hicks had to stand there and tell the public to STOP sharing unverified information, because a name had been circulating all over social media as the shooter, and it was flat wrong. Not “mostly right.” Wrong. A real human being in Twin Falls, Idaho woke up Sunday accused of a massacre by ten thousand strangers with a phone and a hunch.
So no. I do not know what political party the shooter belonged to. Neither do you. Neither does the guy with 900,000 followers who told you Saturday night with total confidence.
Some of these people are muddying the water to make it look deep. I would rather be right on Tuesday than loud on Saturday, and if that costs me a few thousand impressions, so be it. Overclaiming is how you hand the other side a free win. The precisely-sourced version of an argument is the one they cannot rebut.
And the confirmed facts here are MORE than enough. They always were.
— PART TWO: THE WORD “CONTROL” MEANS SOMETHING SPECIFIC AND YOU ARE USING IT WRONG —
In a laboratory, a CONTROL is the variable you hold constant so you can measure what actually changed. That is the whole point. You control one thing in order to isolate the effect of another.
America has run the “restrict the object” experiment for sixty years. Federal Firearms Act. Gun Control Act of 1968. Brady. The 1994 assault weapons ban with a ten-year sunset and a stack of studies afterward that could not find the effect anybody promised. State-level bans. Magazine limits. Waiting periods. Red flag statutes.
Sixty years of adjusting the same variable. And the people running the experiment have NEVER ONCEcontrolled for the variable that actually produces the outcome, which is the human being holding the thing.
Then there is the other definition. The military one. FIRE CONTROL. That is the ability to place rounds precisely where they need to go and nowhere else. Muzzle discipline. Trigger discipline. Knowing your backstop. Knowing when NOT to shoot, which is the harder half.
On Saturday, in a parking lot full of screaming families and running kids, a man in a drive-thru line and an off-duty trooper who was just out getting lunch made the decision to put their own bodies between a rifle and everybody else. Then they placed their shots. In chaos. With a rifle pointing back at them.
THAT is control. That is the only definition of the word that has ever saved a single American life in a parking lot.
The other kind of control is a piece of paper. Paper does not have a muzzle. Paper does not have a heartbeat. Paper has never once stopped anything.
— PART THREE: THE PHYSICS PROBLEM NOBODY WANTS TO SOLVE —
Here is where I put on the teacher hat, and here is where the argument stops being about feelings.
The FBI, working with Texas State University, studied 160 active shooter incidents in the United States between 2000 and 2013. It remains the foundational data set. Read it yourself, it is free on the FBI’s website. Three findings:
SIXTY PERCENT of those incidents ended BEFORE police arrived.
Of the 63 incidents where investigators could establish a duration, 44 of them, sixty-nine percent, ended in FIVE MINUTES OR LESS. Twenty-three ended in TWO MINUTES OR LESS.
And in 64 of the 160 incidents, forty percent, the shooter committed suicide. Thirty-seven of those before police even got there.
Now do the arithmetic with me, because this is a physics problem and physics does not care about your feelings or mine.
A semi-automatic rifle in the hands of somebody who is not aiming carefully cycles about one round per second without breaking a sweat. Call it conservative. In one hundred twenty seconds, that is a number I am not going to write out, because you can do it in your head and it will keep you up tonight.
Now, the fastest 911 dispatch in America still has to answer, verify, geolocate, and dispatch. Then a cruiser has to physically traverse distance. Distance divided by velocity equals time. There is no legislative amendment to that equation. Congress cannot repeal it. The governor of Illinois cannot repeal it. It is arithmetic and it is indifferent to your politics.
So the actual question, the ONLY question, is this: what happens in the gap?
For the last three decades, one side’s entire answer to that question has been “hide, and wait, and hope.” Lock the door. Turn off the lights. Pile the desks. Send a text to your mom. I have sat through that training as a teacher. I have watched my own students practice it. And I have watched grown adults with education degrees explain to fifteen-year-olds that the plan is to be quiet until somebody with a gun shows up to save them from the somebody with a gun.
You will forgive me if I have noticed the load-bearing contradiction in that sentence.
What is next? Someone will propose that the correct response to a rifle is a hashtag and a moment of silence… wait. I have just been handed a note. That IS the plan. That has been the entire plan since 1999.
— PART FOUR: THE SUPREME COURT ALREADY TOLD YOU NOBODY IS COMING —
This is the part that makes people genuinely angry when they learn it, and every American adult should know it cold.
DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189 (1989). Four-year-old Joshua DeShaney was beaten by his father into permanent, profound brain damage. Social services had been repeatedly warned. They had documented it. They did nothing. The Supreme Court held that the Due Process Clause imposes NO affirmative constitutional duty on the state to protect an individual from private violence.
Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005). Jessica Gonzales had a restraining order against her estranged husband. He took her three daughters. She called the Castle Rock police repeatedly, over hours, begging. They did not act. He murdered all three girls and then died in a shootout at the station. The Supreme Court held she had no constitutional property interest in police ENFORCEMENT of that order, because enforcement is discretionary.
And going back further, Warren v. District of Columbia (1981), where the D.C. Court of Appeals held that police owe a duty to the public at large and not to any particular individual.
Read those three cases together and the legal reality of your life in this country is this: the government has no enforceable constitutional obligation to save you personally. None. It is not a talking point. It is settled law, and it was settled by courts, not by the NRA.
So a citizen stands in a parking lot in Twin Falls, Idaho, and the law itself has already informed him that nobody is coming in time. And then somebody wants to disarm him and call it “safety.”
That argument is as useful as a screen door on a submarine.
— PART FIVE: THE BEST PREVENTIVE MEDICINE IS FIRE SUPERIORITY —
Here is where I stop being a physics teacher for a minute and go back to being what I was for twenty-three years.
68 WHISKEY. Combat medic. And every combat medic in the United States Army learns one principle before he ever learns a single thing about trauma care, and it is not a tourniquet and it is not a chest seal.
THE BEST FORM OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE IS FIRE SUPERIORITY.
That is not a slogan I invented for a post. That is Care Under Fire. It is the FIRST phase of Tactical Combat Casualty Care, and it sits in that position for a reason the Army learned the hard way, by burying medics.
The doctrine, plainly stated: while rounds are still coming, you do not treat the patient. You cannot. If I go to a knee in the open to work a casualty while somebody is still shooting, I have not produced one saved life. I have produced TWO CASUALTIES, and now there is nobody left standing to treat either of us. That math is brutal and it is not negotiable and it does not care how brave I feel.
So the medic returns fire. The medic helps WIN the fight first.
And I need you to understand that this is not the medic abandoning medicine. Returning fire IS the medicine. It is the highest-leverage medical intervention available on that ground. Every round that suppresses that shooter is a patient I never have to treat, a limb I never have to tourniquet, a family I never have to sit down with, a name that never gets read at a vigil. Nobody claps for it, because the casualty that never happens does not have a face or a GoFundMe. But it is real, and it is the only intervention that scales.
I am telling you, as a man who did this for a living: ME SHOOTING BACK SAVES MORE PEOPLE THAN ME TREATING THE WOUNDED. Every time. It is not close.
Now take the rifle out of my hands and leave me the aid bag and tell me to wait for somebody else to make the shooting stop.
Congratulations. You have just invented the modern American active shooter response.
Every “run, hide, fight” briefing in this country has the priority order EXACTLY BACKWARD from what the United States Army figured out at enormous cost. We teach schoolchildren to hide quietly and wait. The Army teaches its medics that hiding and waiting is precisely how you turn one casualty into nine.
— AND THEN THERE IS THE OTHER HALF OF THE DOCTRINE —
SELF AID / BUDDY AID. SABA. Every soldier gets it. Not just medics. Every single one.
Why? Because the Army looked at reality and admitted something out loud that our politicians will not: THE MEDIC IS NOT ALWAYS GOING TO BE STANDING NEXT TO YOU. Help is minutes out. You are bleeding now. So YOU are going to pack that wound. YOU are going to put on that tourniquet. YOU are going to keep your buddy breathing until somebody with more training arrives.
Read that again and then go back and look at Part Three. The United States Army confronted the exact same problem we are discussing — help is minutes away, people are dying in seconds — and the doctrinal answer it arrived at was to TRAIN AND EQUIP THE PERSON WHO IS ALREADY THERE.
That is the entire solution. There is not a second page.
And yet the same country that will spend real money teaching a nineteen-year-old private to control a femoral bleed with his bare hands turns around and informs a forty-year-old father in a drive-thru line that his role in the emergency is to lie flat and hold his phone steady.
I taught Self Aid / Buddy Aid for years. Judging by the policy proposals, a whole lot of people were not paying attention in my class. If brains were dynamite, some of these folks could not blow their nose.
— PART SIX: BANNING THE OBJECT. A HISTORY OF SPECTACULAR, DOCUMENTED FAILURE —
We tried it. Once. Big. With a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT, which is the most serious instrument the American people possess.
The Eighteenth Amendment. Ratified 1919, in force January 1920. Banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors nationwide.
Results: bootlegging as a national industry. Speakeasies. Al Capone. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Thousands of Americans blinded or killed by industrial alcohol. The birth of modern organized crime as an institution that outlived the law by a century.
Thirteen years later, on December 5th, 1933, the American people passed the TWENTY-FIRST AMENDMENT to repeal the thing. That remains the only time in American history that an amendment was ratified for the express purpose of erasing another one. We did not tinker with it. We did not reform it. We tore it out by the roots and admitted, on the permanent record, that prohibiting an object from people who want it does not work.
You cannot ban a thing out of existence. You can only ban it out of the hands of people who follow laws. Anybody who has not figured that out by now has a leak in the think tank.
And if you think the tool is the problem, look overseas:
SAGAMIHARA, JAPAN. 2016. Satoshi Uematsu walked into a care facility for disabled people and killed 19 human beings and wounded 26 with a KNIFE. Japan has among the strictest firearms laws on the planet. Nineteen dead. A knife.
LONDON BRIDGE. 2017. Three terrorists drove a van into pedestrians and then went through Borough Market with knives. Eight dead, forty-eight injured. The United Kingdom banned handguns in 1997.
TRAVERSE CITY, MICHIGAN. 2025. Bradford James Gille attacked shoppers inside a Walmart with a FOLDING KNIFE and injured eleven people. He was charged with terrorism and attempted murder.
CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA. 2025. Iryna Zarutska, twenty-three years old, stabbed to death on a light rail train. The suspect later faced a federal charge.
The evil was never in the object. It was in the man. Every single time. The object is downstream. Trying to explain this to certain politicians is like trying to baptize a cat.
— PART SEVEN: A MODEST PROPOSAL, SINCE WE ARE BANNING TOOLS NOW —
If the operative principle is “the tool is dangerous, therefore ban the tool,” then let us be intellectually consistent for one afternoon.
Roughly FORTY THOUSAND Americans die in motor vehicle crashes every single year. Every year. That is not a bad year, that is the baseline. Vehicles have also been used deliberately as weapons in London, in Nice, in New Orleans on New Year’s Day 2025.
So: ban cars. All of them. Personal automobile ownership prohibited nationwide, with a mandatory buyback funded by whoever is not asking questions. Forty thousand lives saved annually, which is several times the number of Americans murdered with rifles of ALL types in a year. Actual arithmetic. Actual bodies. Actual solution.
It is just common sense. This is not a radical thing.
While we are at it, let us apply the same logic in my classroom. Mandatory socialist grading. The kids with the highest GPAs are clearly hoarding points that struggling students need, so we will redistribute them until the average comes up. Nobody is harmed. Everybody benefits. Equity of outcome.
No takers? Suddenly everyone remembers that incentives exist, that consequences exist, that people respond to systems, and that punishing the compliant does absolutely nothing to the non-compliant?
Funny how the logic only stops working when it is YOUR ox getting gored.
— PART EIGHT: THE PART EVERY SINGLE PERSON SKIPS —
Forty percent. That FBI number again. In 64 of 160 active shooter incidents, the shooter killed himself. Thirty-seven of them before police even pulled up.
Chad Williams died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Stop and process what that actually tells you. A person who intends to die at the end of the event is, by definition, undeterred by criminal penalty. He is not weighing a sentencing guideline. He is not checking whether the magazine he bought is compliant with state statute. Every deterrent you have built into the legal system assumes a defendant who wants a future. He does not have one. He decided that before he left the house.
That is not a firearms policy problem. That is a MENTAL HEALTH problem wearing a firearms policy costume, and we keep treating the costume.
Twenty-three years wearing the aid bag, and a civilian paramedic before that. I have knelt next to people at the exact moment the bottom fell out of their lives, and I will tell you what nobody wants to hear: you cannot legislate that away. There is no Care Under Fire protocol for a man who decided three weeks ago that he was not coming home. You can only reach the person before they get there. That requires actual mental health infrastructure, actual crisis intervention, actual community, actual fathers in homes, actual human beings who notice when somebody goes dark and DO something about it.
That is hard. It is expensive. It takes years, and it produces no clip for the evening news. Passing a bill named after a dead person takes an afternoon and gets you a photo op.
Guess which one Congress picks. Every time.
And while we are on the subject of what Congress will and will not fund: an off-duty trooper and a civilian ran TOWARD gunfire on Saturday. That instinct is the same one that puts a medic on his feet when everybody else is going to ground. There are about 54,000 combat-wounded veterans in this country who did exactly that, got medically retired before twenty years because of it, and now watch the federal government claw back their retirement pay dollar for dollar against their VA disability. The Major Richard Star Act (H.R. 2102) fixes it. It costs a fraction of what we spend arguing about it. Both Major Star and his widow Tonya are gone now, both at 51, and it still is not law. Sign the discharge petition, H.Res. 1247.
We will fund a press conference about heroes. We will not fund the ones we already made.
— PART NINE: QUINN’S LAWS, RIGHT ON SCHEDULE —
Jim Quinn’s First Law of Liberalism: “Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent.”
The gun-free zone is the purest illustration of this law that has ever existed. The stated intent is safety. The actual mechanism is a publicly posted sign that informs every armed predator in a fifty-mile radius that the return fire in this building is guaranteed to be zero for at least four minutes. You did not create a safe space. You created an ADVERTISEMENT. Quinn called it in one sentence and never had to revise it.
Quinn’s Fifth Law: “When liberalism conflicts with reality, reality must give way.”
A man with a rifle in a drive-thru at 2:29 on a Saturday afternoon does not care about your county ordinance. He has not read it. Reality declined to give way. Reality never does. It just sits there being real while people with delusions of adequacy insist it is going to come around eventually.
Quinn’s Thirteenth Law: “Liberals are political opportunists; they can never let a good crisis go to waste.”
Three families in Twin Falls had not been formally notified yet. Victims were still in surgery. And the policy demands were already scheduled, already drafted, already trending. Some of these blatherskites had a statement out before the shelter-in-place order was lifted.
— PART TEN: THE LIST THEY READ INTO THE CONGRESSIONAL RECORD IN 1963 —
On January 10, 1963, Congressman A.S. Herlong Jr. of Florida stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and read into the permanent Congressional Record a list titled “45 Communist Goals for America.” I did not write it. It is a primary source. Anyone can pull it.
I am not calling anybody a communist. I am asking you to evaluate OUTCOMES, which is what a science teacher does.
GOAL NUMBER 29: Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, and out of step with modern needs.
Every time somebody tells you the Second Amendment was written for muskets and cannot possibly apply to a modern republic, you are hearing Goal 29 recited back to you almost word for word, sixty-three years later, usually by someone who has never read the Federalist Papers. Federalist No. 46, by the way, where Madison explicitly discusses the advantage Americans possess in “being armed.” Not a footnote. His argument.
GOAL NUMBER 38: Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies.
Defund the police. Then, when response times triple, disarm the citizen who is now waiting even longer. The outcomes match the plan whether or not anyone ever intended them to, and pretending otherwise is not sophistication, it is willful blindness.
— PART ELEVEN: WHAT ACTUAL CONTROL LOOKED LIKE ON SATURDAY —
Here is the piece of this story I keep coming back to, and it is the one detail that demolishes the entire “leave it to the professionals” argument.
One of the two men who engaged that shooter was an OFF-DUTY Idaho State Police trooper.
Off duty. Not dispatched. Not responding to a call. Not part of any tactical plan. He was a guy getting lunch on a Saturday who happened to be carrying, exactly like the private citizen next to him.
Understand what that means. Even the professional in this story only worked because he was ARMED AS A CIVILIAN, in a parking lot, with no warning, off the clock. He was not law enforcement arriving. He was a man in line with a gun on his hip.
Strip the concealed carry permit out of that scenario and you do not get one hero instead of two. You get ZERO. You get a longer video.
Two men. One badge, one not. Neither of those facts mattered in that moment. What mattered is that both were armed, both were trained, and both chose to close distance toward the danger instead of away from it, which is a thing that cannot be legislated into a person and cannot be legislated out of one either.
And notice what those two men did NOT do. They did not start triaging in the open while a rifle was still working. They ended the shooting first. Fire superiority, then medicine. Every medic in the Army would have recognized exactly what was happening in that parking lot, because it is the first thing we are taught and the last thing we forget.
Police say that is what drove him off. Police say that is what prevented further casualties. That is not my opinion, that is the chief at a podium.
Those two men treated more patients by shooting than any ambulance did by arriving. That is what preventive medicine actually looks like when the sirens are still four minutes out.
That is control. Everything else is paperwork.
— THE PART WHERE I SAY THE QUIET PART —
I am not going to dance on this. Three families in Idaho are living the worst week of their lives right now. An employee went to work at a burger place and did not come home. A taxi driver got shot twice while charging his car. There is nothing to celebrate in any of it.
But I am done pretending that the only permitted response to a mass shooting is to demand that lawful people surrender the one tool that has ever actually interrupted one. Sixty percent of these events are over before police arrive. That is the FBI’s number, not mine. So somebody is going to be there in the gap. It is going to be a citizen. Always. Every time. The only variable you actually get to control is whether that citizen is capable of doing anything about it.
In a battle of wits over this, the gun control crowd keeps showing up unarmed, and then acts surprised when the argument goes the way it always goes.
But what do I know. I am only a 23-year combat medic who was taught on day one that THE BEST FORM OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE IS FIRE SUPERIORITY, that the difference between a casualty and a survivor is measured in MINUTES rather than in legislation, and that no bill ever written has arrived on a scene faster than the person who was already standing there.
Should have paid attention during Self Aid / Buddy Aid.
IF THIS ARTICLE MADE YOU THINK: LIKE this article so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it. SHARE this — every share really helps get the word out. Use it. COMMENT below with your take. Specifically: if 60 percent of these incidents end BEFORE police arrive, tell me what your plan is for those first four minutes. I want to hear an actual answer, not a slogan. Tell me.
And if you want MORE of this — the data, the history, the science, the stories — JOIN Bski’s Classroom community or follow me on YouTube. Even better, subscribe to my account; it is about the cost of a cup of coffee per month. That is it. Your support keeps this classroom open, and I promise I will never run out of material as long as the left keeps trying to out-dumb itself.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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