It’s possible to stop mass shooters, but not if the gun grabbers get their way.
On Saturday, a gunman opened fire at an In-N-Out restaurant in Twin Falls, Idaho. Twenty-four-year-old Chad Williams killed three people and injured seven others before taking his own life. One of the victims was Ashley Garibay, a 23-year-old employee at the recently opened store.
This murderous dirt bag would have almost certainly killed more people if not for one fact. While he was in the midst of his killing spree, two men fired back. One was an off-duty state trooper. The other was Jordan Salinas, who was outside the restaurant when he heard gunshots.
Salinas pulled out his FN Five-SeveN pistol and began looking for the shooter. He saw Williams raise his rifle and begin shooting at cars. Salinas took aim and fired. Salinas said that the gunman seemed shocked.
“He did not like it when bullets started firing both ways,” Salinas told the Idaho Statesman.
These men are “true heroes in our community, and their actions diverted the shooter and no doubt saved many lives,” Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson said.
This isn’t the first time a good guy with a gun has stopped an act of violence. It’s happened numerous times, including in Las Vegas. In 2023, a gunman at UNLV killed three people. Law enforcement arrived quickly and killed him during a standoff. But police officers aren’t the only ones who have stopped would-be mass shooters.
At the end of 2019, Jack Wilson shot and killed a gunman at his church in Texas. In 2022, a man fired a rifle into a crowd of people at a party, but a woman used her pistol to shoot and kill him. Police credited her with saving several lives. In 2022, Elisjsha Dicken shot and killed a man who started shooting inside an Indiana mall.
After a 2021 shooting at the Boise Towne Square mall, Salinas started training with a firearm in earnest. He provides full-time care for his brother, who’s in a wheelchair. Salinas believed a gunman would look for “soft targets” — such as a man in a wheelchair and his caregiver.
He refused to be one and ended up saving numerous lives.
Think about what would have happened if gun-control advocates had been able to enact new restrictions after the 2021 Boise shooting. They would have made it harder for Salinas to obtain the weapon he used to stop this mass shooting. That’s because new gun laws have the greatest effect on the least dangerous people. People are alive today because Idaho has firearm freedom.
Don’t expect a national debate on these trade-offs. The propaganda press has a predictable rubric for how much coverage mass shootings receive. If the villain or narrative can be tied to conservatives, it’ll be a major story. If the villain is connected to the left, it’ll be a story about guns. If the shooting is inconvenient to gun grabbers, it’ll disappear. And if it involves gangs, it won’t even make the national news. Another example of inverse journalism.
It’s not intentional, but mass shooters have no stronger allies than gun-control advocates.
Victor Joecks’ column appears in the Opinion section each Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow
@victorjoecks on X.
