A Burger, a Rifle, and the Bankruptcy of the Middle Course

An In-N-Out stands open one week in Twin Falls, and already three citizens lie dead, seven injured, the gunman himself among the bodies. A witness sees a man with an AR‑style rifle emerge from the drive‑thru. Police later find the suspected shooter dead near the restaurant. The hospital says it is working closely with law enforcement; the governor calls for prayers; the company president says her heart is broken. All this is human and even honorable as private feeling. But the effectual truth is simpler and harder: an armed man decided to kill, found no barrier strong enough to stop him in time, and the state is left to count its wounded.

When I wrote that founders must assume all men are bad and will give loose to their evil inclinations when they have free field, I was not speaking of monsters but of ordinary men with weapons and occasions. Here the occasion is obvious: a crowded new restaurant, a busy commercial area, habits of normality that make people slow to believe that the man with the rifle is about to fire. The appetite remains hidden until the first shots, and then it is too late. A city of 56,000 souls may seem tranquil, yet tranquillity without strong dykes is only a plain waiting for the flood.

In The Prince I compared fortune to a raging river that drowns those who have not raised embankments while the weather was fair, as translated by W. K. Marriott. The shooter is fortune’s flood; the embankments are intelligence, prevention, and the arms of the state. Police and first responders in Twin Falls do act; the hospital coordinates with them; order is eventually restored. That is something. But the river has already swept away lives. To judge prudently, one asks not whether the storm came — storms always come — but what preparations existed the day before an armed man decided to step out of a drive‑thru.

Here the state reveals its favorite delusion: the middle course. It proclaims security, deploys law enforcement, and yet allows a situation in which a single individual can kill quickly in a crowded place. It wants the honors of severity and the comforts of indulgence, and thus pays the price of both. Ill‑used mercy is not only the pardon of a criminal; it is also the softness that leaves citizens exposed, the refusal to take hard measures to make sudden violence difficult. The few suffer under well‑used severity; the many suffer when severity is avoided until shots are already fired.

Nor is this only a question of arms in the narrow sense. In The Art of War I argued that good arms are those tied to the republic itself. In your age this means not only police, but also the networks of information, training, and rehearsal that make every institution ready for the worst day, not the best. A new restaurant opens; crowds gather; was there a considered plan, drilled and enforced, for how to react to an armed attacker? Or did everyone trust in the general peacefulness of Idaho and the prayers of officials? When men do not change with the times, but the times grow harsher, the old playbook becomes a death sentence.

The company president’s grief is also part of the political theater. I do not say this to mock it. Appearances are a hard currency: if she said nothing, suspicion would fall on the company; if she spoke coldly, it would lose its customers’ trust. Her statement that her heart is broken assures the public that the firm stands with the victims. This is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Words without new orders, without visible arms to protect future customers and workers, become the same soft middle course that has already failed: flattering speeches on top, exposed flesh beneath.

What, then, does a republic that wishes to remain one take from Twin Falls? First, that violent appetites armed with rifles are a fixed feature of the landscape, not a passing cloud. Second, that fortune will always find the weakest point — the new store, the busy parking lot, the unpracticed staff. Third, that institutions which rely on luck and sadness after the fact will be judged not by their sentiments but by their dead. A free people cannot abolish conflict or danger, but it can make the cost of acting on murderous appetites so high, and the resistance so swift, that most men never seize the occasion. That is what it means, in a hard world, to maintain the state.