Three Killed and Seven Injured in Shooting at Idaho In-N-Out Restaurant
A Burger Shop in a State of War
The Idaho shooting is not a mystery of motives but a plain violation of natural law, and it reminds us what government is for — and what it is not.
A man steps from a drive‑thru with an AR‑style rifle, three people are killed and seven wounded, a new restaurant in Twin Falls is turned in an instant from a house of ordinary labour into a scene of slaughter. Police find the suspected gunman dead nearby; hospitals and law enforcement “work closely” to manage the aftermath. The president of the company says her heart is broken. I begin there, not with abstractions, because this is how political philosophy properly starts: with lives cut short, with injuries to flesh and spirit, with the tangible ruin of families who ordered a meal and instead received a wound.
When I wrote in the Second Treatise that men are by nature in a state of perfect freedom and equality, I did not mean they are free to do as they list against others, but that they are free within the bounds of the law of nature, which is reason teaching every one that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions,” to use the sense of my own words. That law binds kings and commoners alike. Whoever walks into a public house and fires upon innocents steps out of that condition of peace into a state of war with those he assails.
This point bears pressing, because men now speak much of motives, of grievances, of disturbed minds. I do not despise inquiry into causes, for a physician must know the distemper; but the first diagnosis is simpler. No public authority commissioned this act; no standing law authorized it; no necessity can be pleaded that three be killed and others critically injured in a burger shop. Here is one private person, setting up his will as rule, employing deadly force without right or impartial judge. That is not misfortune alone; it is usurpation of a power no man ever had confided to him.
From this follows, secondly, what political power is for. As I defined it in that same Treatise, it is a right to make and enforce laws solely for the public good, to preserve lives, liberties, and estates. The trust reposed in governors and their officers is limited by that end. When the Twin Falls police move to stop an active shooter, when first responders hasten to preserve the wounded, they exercise a kind of prerogative, for they must act swiftly, often without express direction in every circumstance. That power is nonetheless legitimate so long as it is answerable after the fact to known law and to an impartial judge, and ordered to the safety of all.
Some will say, thirdly, that the very occurrence of such a crime proves government has failed, and that citizens are cast back into the state of nature, to trust only themselves or private force. Here my argument is more cautious. No government, however vigilant, can prevent every wicked design. The question is not whether evil happens but whether there is a settled course of justice afterward, and a visible care beforehand. A single outrage, however grievous, does not dissolve the political bond. Only a long train of abuses, or a deliberate pattern whereby rulers themselves invade the property of the people, can have that effect; here, by the facts before me, I see a criminal, not a magistrate, at war with society.
There is yet the place of the company whose sign hangs over the scene. A corporation that invites the public in, that employs men and women on its premises, undertakes in reason some duty of care for their safety. It cannot claim the sword of the commonwealth; it ought not to wield arbitrary power over patrons or staff. Between impotence and tyranny stands a sober responsibility: to observe prudent measures, to cooperate with civil authorities, to avoid practices that recklessly expose workers to known dangers. They hold their power, too, on trust, though of another kind. Their charge is not to command, but to protect those whose labour enriches them and whose custom sustains them.
In all this, what most disturbs me is not only that one man could so cheaply destroy the workmanship of our common Maker, but that public feeling, stunned by repetition of such scenes, may grow weary and cynical about law itself. That temptation must be resisted. The alternative to government so bounded by consent and natural law is not some safe private order, but every man a judge in his own case, every grievance an occasion for force, every restaurant a possible battlefield. If we forget that the true end of authority is simply that men may sit and eat in peace, we shall soon have none.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Absolute arbitrary power is worse than the state of nature it claims to cure. Judge any concentration of discretion — executive, corporate, algorithmic — by whether it leaves those subject to it a known standing law and an impartial judge, or makes the powerful judge in their own case.