Another Mass Shooting. This One in Trump Country.

At about 2:30 on Saturday afternoon, police in Twin Falls, Idaho, began responding to what they called an active shooter incident at the In-N-Out Burger on Blue Lakes Boulevard — a restaurant that had only just opened, on the busy commercial stretch of town. A witness, Lane Koehn, described a man dressed in black coming out of the drive-thru with an AR-style rifle and opening fire. Three people are dead, the gunman among them. At least two more were wounded. The Perrine Bridge, which carries traffic between the city and the interstate, was closed for hours, and St. Luke's Magic Valley issued a critical alert asking the public to stay away from the hospital unless they had an emergency of their own.

A still from video taken by a witness shows the gunman outside the In-N-Out Burger on Blue Lakes Boulevard in Twin Falls, Idaho, Saturday, August 1, 2026. (Kevin Bell Jr. via AP)

Police Chief Matthew Hicks told reporters Saturday evening that the shooter was dead near the scene and that he believed the threat to the community was over. He said his department was still working to establish the man's identity and his motive, and expected to know more in the coming days. Josh Palmer, the city's public information officer, said he expected the casualty count to rise. As of this writing the victims have not been publicly named, and nobody has offered a reason. Those are the things we do not know. Here are the things we already do.

Where it happened.

And the law that was in force there.

The argument is going to arrive before the victims are named. It always does, and it always takes the same shape — that the guns are not the problem, the laws are the problem, the soft laws, the blue-state laws, the gun-free zones. I want to be careful with it, because two families in Twin Falls got the worst phone call of their lives on Saturday and nothing written here returns anyone to them. But an argument that is about to be made about this town has to survive contact with this town.

There is no Democratic gun law in Twin Falls, Idaho. There is no gun law in Twin Falls, Idaho. The state removed nearly all of them and then removed the city's power to write its own. A man walked into a hamburger restaurant on a Saturday afternoon in the reddest county of Trump's third-reddest state — a place with no permit requirement, no training requirement, no waiting period, no background check on a private sale, and no red flag law that could have taken a weapon out of anyone's hands — and by the time it was over three people were dead.

It was not a gun-free zone. Under Idaho law any adult in that dining room could have been carrying, at eighteen, without a permit or a day of instruction. Every condition that gets asked for after one of these was already in place on Saturday afternoon, and it happened anyway. Whatever is about to get blamed for this, it cannot be a law that Idaho does not have.

And I want to take the other argument seriously too, because it is already being made. Lane Koehn, the witness, says a man with a pistol started firing at the shooter. Chief Hicks has not said how the gunman died, so treat that as an account and not a finding — but if it is what happened, that man did something almost nobody is ever brave enough to do, and he should be named and thanked when the facts are in. The trouble is what gets built on top of him within the hour: that the answer is more people carrying, fewer rules about who and where and how.

Hold that against the rest of this page. Idaho asked the man with the pistol for no permit, no license, no training and no waiting period — and it asked precisely the same of the man he was shooting at. The gunman walked up to a drive-thru window with a rifle under the exact freedom now being offered as the remedy, and he used it for as long as he wanted to use it. He was not defeated by the absence of a gun law. He was enabled by it first, and stopped by a person second. You cannot give the law all the credit for how it ended and none of the blame for how it started.

— Michael

Spotlight Dispatch · August 2, 2026

michael@spotlightdispatch.com