A 35-year-old man named Jordan Salinas was eating at an In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho on Saturday afternoon when a gunman opened fire, killing at least three people and wounding several others. Salinas drew his own weapon — an FN Five-seveN pistol — and started shooting back.
"He did not like it when bullets started firing both ways," Salinas said of the shooter.
That single sentence is doing more for the Second Amendment than a decade of congressional testimony. And much to the chagrin of the left-leaning media outlets that dominate out airways, they had to air that powerful statement for all to hear.
Twin Falls Police Chief Matthew Hicks confirmed what anyone with common sense already knew. "We believe their actions helped drive the suspect away from the scene, preventing further casualties," Hicks said. Not a complicated statement. A man with a gun stopped a massacre from getting worse.
Witness Lane Koehn was inside the restaurant when it happened. "The shooter solely focused on him and allowed us to get out," Koehn told reporters. Think about that for a second. The gunman had a building full of unarmed targets. Then one person shot back, and suddenly every other person in that restaurant stopped being a target.
Koehn put it even more plainly in another interview: "Yeah, I would say he definitely distracted the shooter from shooting more people."
ABC's Trevor Ault covered it on Good Morning America. NBC's Dana Griffin reported it on Nightly News, with fill-in anchor Hallie Jackson at the desk. CBS Mornings anchor Kelly O'Grady covered it too. All three networks acknowledged, in their own carefully hedged language, that an armed civilian engaged the shooter and likely saved lives.
Nobody broke out the phrase "good guy with a gun" voluntarily. You could practically hear the producers' teeth grinding through the teleprompter. These are the same networks that treat every mass shooting as a referendum on gun ownership — right up until the moment an armed citizen proves the entire editorial thesis wrong.
Salinas didn't hesitate. "There's a task that needs to be done and we're the ones who need to do it," he said. No hand-wringing. No waiting for someone else. A man saw evil, had the means to confront it, and acted.
The networks will move on after today. They always do when the story shows how armed civilians can prevent further casualties. But rest assured that the next shooting that fits the narrative will get wall-to-wall coverage and solemn calls for legislation. This one — the one where an armed American stopped the killing — gets forty-eight hours and a quiet burial in the archive.
Three people still died in Twin Falls on Saturday. That's a tragedy no headline can fix. But "several wounded" is a different number than it would have been if Jordan Salinas had followed the advice of every network anchor, editorial board, and gun-control lobbyist in the country.
He didn't leave his rights at the door. And the people who walked out of that In-N-Out alive know exactly why.
