The Weight of the Decision: Concealed Carry and The Use of Force
On Saturday, a gunman opened fire outside an In-N-Out in Twin Falls, Idaho. Three people are dead and several more wounded. The investigation is still open, and the account of exactly what happened is still moving day to day.
I am not going to reconstruct that afternoon. I have built enough investigations and reviewed enough after-action reports to know what happens to a narrative built on the first 48 hours of witness accounts. It changes. What the event puts squarely in front of anyone who carries a firearm is the weight of a decision made in under a second.
Carrying Is Not a Plan
A firearm solves one narrow problem: an immediate, otherwise unstoppable threat to life. Everything else—awareness, avoidance, de-escalation, movement, and communicating with responding officers—has to happen around that tool for it to be used well, or avoided entirely.
Marksmanship Is the Easy Part
A square range builds a foundation. It does not recreate what a real encounter does to the body: heart rate spikes, vision narrows, fine motor control degrades, and the target moves among people who have nothing to do with the fight. Drawing from concealment, clearing a malfunction, reassessing before every trigger press, and knowing when not to shoot are trained skills.
The Decision Is Yours
No instructor and no article can make the call for you. Training makes sure the moment is not improvised from nothing. People who have thought through their legal standard, trained force-on-force, and understand justified defense still make the decision—but they do not make it from a blank page.
Liability Does Not Care That You Meant Well
Criminal exposure does not disappear because the shooter was the aggressor. Civil liability runs on a separate track. Every missed round belongs to the person who fired it. None of this argues against carrying or stepping in when a life is in immediate danger. It argues for understanding, before the choice presents itself, exactly what it carries.
What This Means for Organizations
Any organization with staff or congregants who carry needs a clear framework before an incident. What is expected? How are they trained to distinguish threat from panic? What is the plan for communicating with responding officers? What liability does the organization carry for how it prepared its people?
Where I Land
Carrying responsibly means treating the decision as something to prepare for now. Marksmanship, manipulation under stress, a clear standard for use of force, and an honest understanding of liability must be built before the day they are needed. Nobody gets to build it afterward.