My Friend Was Shot Confronting an Active Shooter at the In-N-Out in Idaho

What churches can learn from the brave men that confronted an active shooter, plus look at my active shooter kit I take with me everyday.

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What Happened

The In-N-Out on Blue Lakes Boulevard in Twin Falls, Idaho had been open 8 days when a 24-year-old man walked in with an AR-style rifle on Saturday afternoon and started shooting. The first 911 calls hit dispatch at 2:29 p.m. Dispatchers could hear screaming and gunfire in the background of those calls. Customers dove out of their seats, some barricaded in the restrooms, and employees ran out the front door onto a busy commercial street. Three people were killed, including a female employee who was working the counter, and 7 more were wounded.

The attack did not stay inside the building. The attacker came out through the drive-thru and kept shooting. He fired into a car in the drive-thru line. He fired through the windshield of a Tesla parked at a charging station, hitting a local taxi driver twice in the back while that man sat in a vehicle he could not drive away because it was plugged in. He fired near the Twin Falls Visitor Center next door. Witnesses described him as panicked and moving erratically across a parking lot full of people who had come out for a burger on a Saturday.

Armed men engaged him. Twin Falls police have credited an off-duty officer and an armed citizen with returning fire, and the reporting so far has not sorted out who was who, so take the labels in the news coverage with some caution. What I can tell you firsthand is this. AJ Scott, a former law enforcement officer and a friend of mine, was sitting in the drive-thru with his wife when the shooting started. AJ told his wife and their friend to stay in the vehicle and moved toward the gunfire to find the shooter. He made a deliberate decision on that approach not to draw his handgun, because he did not want responding police or another armed citizen to mistake him for the attacker. He came around a corner and met the man face to face. The attacker raised the rifle and shot him. The round shattered his humerus and severed an artery.

AJ took the attacker’s full attention while he was bleeding out and trying to get to cover. He never fired a shot. He drew that attention with his body and nothing else. Somewhere in the same few seconds, an armed man in the drive-thru line was shooting at the attacker. A witness stopped at the light outside the restaurant said the shooter became solely focused on the man shooting at him, and that this is what let the cars in the drive-thru get out. The attacker broke contact, moved off, and killed himself nearby. Police credit those two men with driving him away from the scene and preventing more deaths.

AJ’s wife is an emergency room nurse. So is the friend who was in the car with them. They found him, loaded him into their own vehicle, controlled the bleeding with direct pressure, and drove him to the hospital themselves. He went straight into emergency surgery and is facing months of recovery.

Everything in that sequence has a church version.

Armor, Bag, and a Carbine

Remember your ABCs. Armor, bag, and a carbine. I roll with body armor, a war bag, and a rifle in my truck every day, and I have taken plenty of grief for it over the years from people who think that is excessive for a man going to get groceries. Saturday in Twin Falls is the answer to those people.

The reason is simple math. This attacker had a rifle in an open commercial parking lot. Look at the geometry of your own church lot and be honest about the distance from the back row of parking to the front doors. Most of the churches I work with are looking at 40 to 70 yards of open ground. That is rifle country. A man with a 5.56 rifle standing at the edge of that lot has every advantage over a security team member with a concealed 9mm, and he knows it.

These are the plates I use. If you can afford it, it is a must.

Soft body armor does not stop rifle rounds. If your team is wearing concealable vests, you are covered against a handgun and nothing else. Rifle-rated plates in a bag in your vehicle are not as good as plates on your chest, but they beat what most teams have, which is nothing. The same goes for a rifle in a locked case in your trunk. Getting to it takes time you may not have, and it is still better than not having one at all.

Carry a Gun You Are Willing to Fight an Active Shooter With

The compact and subcompact pistol has taken over the concealed carry market because it is comfortable. Comfort is the wrong design requirement for a fighting gun. Those guns were built to be carried, not to be fought with, and the tradeoffs that make them easy to conceal are the same tradeoffs that hurt you in a gunfight.

Look at the problem in front of you. A man with a rifle is shooting people 50 yards away across a parking lot. You need enough gun to make hits at that distance, enough capacity to keep his head down while people get out, and enough of a grip to shoot it well under a heart rate of 180 with your hands shaking. A duty-size pistol does that. A subcompact does it badly. If a duty pistol is what it takes to fight your way to the rifle in your truck, then a duty pistol is what you carry to church.

There is a clock running the whole time and it is the part most people never account for. Ed Monk, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who has researched active shooter events since 2007 and who wrote a book called First 30 Seconds, puts it in terms of time and math. In the opening minute of these attacks, a new person gets shot every 3 to 5 seconds. Every one of those ticks is a human being. That is why he argues the difference between an event with single-digit casualties and one with double digits is usually decided inside the first 30 seconds, long before police arrive. Run that math against a 5-minute police response and you can see how the body count in some of these events got where it did.

So the standard for your gun is not whether it is enough to survive a mugging. The standard is whether it is enough to interrupt a man with a rifle inside 30 seconds, from wherever you happen to be standing when it starts.

Many of you will balk at carrying a full-size gun. Almost every objection I hear comes down to comfort, and comfort is a holster problem and a belt problem. Both are solved with about $150 and two weeks of getting used to it. Carry a gun you are willing to fight an active shooter with.

The Identification Problem

AJ did not draw his gun on the approach. He is a trained former officer moving toward gunfire in plain clothes, and he understood that the most likely way for him to die in the next 60 seconds was for a cop or another armed citizen to see a man in street clothes with a gun in his hand and make the obvious assumption. So he kept it holstered while he moved to locate the threat. Then he came around a corner into a rifle at contact distance.

I am not going to second-guess a man who ran toward gunfire while I was sitting at home, and under the information he had, that was a defensible call. The lesson is not that AJ made a mistake. The lesson is that a plainclothes responder gets forced to choose between being ready to fight and being recognized as one of the good guys, and no armed responder should ever have to make that choice inside their own building.

This is why CWT teaches visible uniformed security instead of plainclothes. A polo with a team logo, a vest, a badge, or a clearly marked shirt does two jobs at once. It tells your congregation who to run to, and it tells arriving police who not to shoot. When your team is identifiable, your people can have a gun in their hand at second one instead of second twenty. The rest of your church is not being covert about anything anyway.

Train the other half of the problem too. Twin Falls had a second officer-involved shooting during the search for this attacker, and Jerome PD is investigating it. Nobody was hit that time. Your team needs a rehearsed answer for the moment police come through the door and find one of your men holding a gun. Gun goes down or gets holstered, hands go up and stay empty, comply first and explain later. Practice it in your drills the same way you practice the shooting.

Drawing Fire Is Effective

Nobody shot this attacker dead. He killed himself. Some people are going to read that and conclude the armed response failed. That reading is exactly backward.

What happened is that the attacker stopped shooting at unarmed people and started dealing with the men who were dealing with him. The witness at the stoplight said the shooter’s attention went entirely to the armed man in the drive-thru line, and that is what gave the cars ahead of him time to get out. AJ never got a round off, and he still pulled that attacker off everyone else in that corner of the lot and kept him occupied while he bled and moved for cover.

There is a way to understand why that works, and it comes out of fighter aviation. Colonel John Boyd described the way a person makes decisions under pressure as a loop with 4 steps. You observe what is in front of you, you orient yourself to what it means, you decide what to do, and you act. Everybody runs that loop constantly, including the man shooting up your church. He walked in with a plan he had rehearsed in his head, which is another way of saying he had already done the observing and the orienting and the deciding long before he got there. All that was left was to act.

Interrupt him and he loses that. Rounds coming back at an attacker take away his ability to act, which throws him back to observe. Now he has to find where the shots are coming from. He cannot orient because he does not know how many people are shooting or where they are or whether the police have arrived, and if he cannot orient, he cannot decide, and if he cannot decide, he cannot act. Witnesses in Twin Falls described this attacker as panicked and moving erratically across the lot. That is what a man stuck in observe looks like from the outside.

Teach your team that stopping the killing does not require a head shot. It requires taking his ability to act away from him and keeping it away. Ed Monk’s research adds something to this that your people should hear before it happens. He teaches that the domestic, mentally disturbed attacker will usually stop when he gets challenged, and will either run or turn the gun on himself. The terrorist attacker is the exception, because he will turn and fight the people coming at him. Saturday in Twin Falls went exactly the way Monk describes the first category. He got shot at, he broke contact, he ran, and he killed himself.

Every second he spends looking for you is a second a mother in the third row uses to get her kids out an exit door. Your people need to hear that before the day comes, because otherwise they will hold their fire waiting for a perfect shot that never arrives.

Practice Like You Will Be Called

The armed man who fired from the drive-thru line had been posting firearms training content online for years. A post of his from 2024 shows him running a drill and telling his followers to train like their life depends on it, because God forbid, one day it might. Two years later he was standing in a drive-thru in Twin Falls with a burger order in and a rifle-armed killer 30 yards away.

AJ is a former law enforcement officer. Everything he did in those few seconds came out of that background. He moved to the sound of the guns, he thought about how he would look to arriving police before he thought about his own gun, and he kept working the problem after he was hit. Neither of these men rose to the occasion. They fell back on their training, which is the only thing anybody has ever done under that kind of stress.

Look honestly at what your team actually does. If your safety team’s training consists of a 90-minute meeting twice a year and a group text, you do not have a trained team. You have a list of names. Get them on a range. Make them shoot at 25 and 50 yards, not 7. Make them shoot from behind cover, on the move, from a seated position in a chair like the one they sit in every Sunday, with a heart rate up. Make them draw from the exact holster and cover garment they wear to church. You never know when it is going to pop off, and the day it does you will not get to choose which version of yourself shows up.

The Attack Moved Through the Parking Lot

Problems begin in the parking lot. I have said that for years and I am going to keep saying it because incidents like this one keep proving it. This attack started inside a building and immediately spilled out into the drive-thru, the lot, the charging station, and the ground around a visitor center next door. Most of the casualties were outside.

The taxi driver who was shot twice in the back could not leave. He was plugged into a charger, which disables the car from driving, and he was sitting in a metal box in the open with no way to move. Your church has the same static targets. You have people sitting in cars in the drop-off lane waiting on kids. You have greeters standing alone at the doors of an empty foyer. You have a parking team out in the open with nothing but a reflective vest. You have older members walking a long row from the back of the lot. Every one of them is exposed for several minutes on either side of a service, and most churches assign their weakest coverage to exactly that window.

Push your perimeter out. Put trained, armed, identifiable people in the lot before the first car arrives and keep them there until the last one leaves. Give them a way to talk to the inside team that does not depend on line of sight. Your front door is not your perimeter and it never was.

Bleeding Control and Scoop and Run

AJ is alive because two emergency room nurses were within 100 yards of him with a car. They found him, held pressure on a severed artery, put him in their own vehicle, and drove him to the hospital. That is a scoop and run, and it is the single most replicable thing in this entire incident.

Understand the wound first. The round shattered his humerus and cut an artery high in the arm. That is a junctional wound, right up at the shoulder where the arm meets the body, and a standard limb tourniquet will often fail there because there is no place above the bleed to put it. What works is hard direct pressure and wound packing, applied by somebody willing to lean their body weight into another human being while that person screams. There are also junctional tourniquets built specifically for wounds at the shoulder, the armpit, and the groin, and I believe churches should be buying them and training on them. They are more expensive than a limb tourniquet and they take real instruction to use, but the wounds they are designed for are the ones that kill people fastest and the ones your CAT will not solve.

Then understand the decision. In a real event you are going to have to choose between waiting for an ambulance and putting your wounded in a vehicle and driving. Best case, the first ambulance is 5 to 10 minutes out. That is the first one, and there will not be enough of them. Twin Falls had 7 people shot at one location. When that happens, medics start doubling and tripling patients into a single unit, and they triage in an order you do not control. Add the time police spend clearing a scene before they let EMS come in at all, and the gap between the shooting and the hospital gets long.

So if you have trained people and you have a vehicle, get your wounded in the vehicle and go. I am not going to tell you to run red lights, I am not going to tell you to blow stop signs, and I am not going to tell you to speed. You are all grown adults and you understand what it takes to get somebody to a trauma center with an artery cut. What I will tell you is that a scoop and run only works if you did the thinking in advance. Know which hospital near your church is the actual trauma center and not just the closest emergency room. Know the route. Know which vehicle in your lot is going and who is driving it. Decide now who stays with the wounded to hold pressure the entire way, because pressure that comes off in the back seat does the same thing as no pressure at all.

Elsewhere in that Twin Falls parking lot, an In-N-Out employee was dragging a coworker with a gunshot wound to the chest across open pavement, and a retired EMT who happened to be nearby worked on her until paramedics could get in. Ordinary people did the right things because they were the ones who were there. Your greeters and your parking team are going to be those people.

Here is the standard for your church. Trauma kits at every post, not one kit in the church office where nobody can reach it. Limb tourniquets, junctional tourniquets, chest seals, gauze for packing, and gloves, in a place your team can grab in under 10 seconds. Every safety team member through Stop the Bleed at a minimum, and your medical people trained on the junctional gear specifically. A casualty collection point everybody knows by name. And a written scoop and run plan with the trauma center, the route, and the driver already decided.

Misinformation Will Move Faster Than Facts

Within hours of this attack, social media had confidently identified the wrong man as the shooter. Twin Falls PD had to hold a press conference and state that a named local resident had no involvement in this whatsoever. That man’s name is now permanently attached to a mass murder in every search index in the world.

Your team will be on their phones during and after an incident at your church. Somebody on the parking team will post a photo of a person they think is suspicious. Somebody in the youth wing will text a rumor to 40 parents. It will be wrong, it will spread, and your church will own it. Decide right now that your team does not post, does not speculate, and does not confirm anything, and that one designated person speaks for the church. Write it into your policy this week and brief it at your next team meeting.

What Your Church Does the Week After

The counseling center for Twin Falls opened at Rock Creek Elementary School. That is a fine place to put one. It should have been a church.

When something like this happens in your town, your building becomes part of the community’s recovery whether you planned for it or not. People who have not been in a church in 20 years will walk through your doors that week looking for somebody to tell them what any of it means. Your pastor will be asked to do a funeral for a family he has never met. Your people will need somewhere to bring food and money and grief. Get ahead of it. Know which of your staff have chaplaincy or crisis training, know how fast you can open your building, know who in your congregation is a nurse or a counselor or a first responder, and have a relationship with your local police chaplain program before you need one.

Biblical Perspective

Nobody in that parking lot woke up Saturday expecting to be in a gunfight.

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them. (Ecclesiastes 9:11-12, ESV)

Solomon is not being fatalistic here and he is not telling you that preparation is pointless. He is telling you that you do not get advance notice. The snare falls suddenly. The people who die in these events are not less deserving than the people who live, and the ones who live are usually the ones who happened to be near somebody who was ready. AJ was ready. He had spent years getting ready for a day he had no way to schedule, and when it came he had a few seconds of warning.

That is the whole argument for what we do. We do not prepare because we know the day. We prepare because we do not.

If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small. Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work? (Proverbs 24:10-12, ESV)

Read that middle line again. Rescue those who are being taken away to death. That is not a suggestion offered to people with a particular temperament. It is a command, and the verse that follows it takes away the only excuse anybody has ever used to get out of it. We did not know. God is not impressed by that, because He weighs the heart and He knows exactly what you knew and what you chose to do about it.

Every church leader in America knows this can happen at their church. Nobody gets to plead ignorance anymore. The question in front of your elder board is not whether you understand the threat. It is whether you did anything with what you understood.

AJ ran toward it. He told his wife to stay in the car and he went to find the man who was killing people. He paid for it with a shattered arm and a severed artery and months of recovery he did not ask for. That is what verse 11 looks like when a real man does it in a real parking lot.

Final Assessment

Armed men who went out for lunch on a Saturday changed the outcome of a mass shooting. Nobody stopped it cleanly, nobody killed the attacker, and one of them is in a hospital bed with a shattered arm. They still saved lives, and the police in Twin Falls have said so plainly. That is what a successful armed response usually looks like outside of a training video. It is partial and it is ugly, and it works.

Your church has the same problem in a different building. You have an open parking lot at rifle distance, a stack of glass doors, a crowd that arrives and leaves at a predictable time twice a week, and a handful of volunteers who will have to decide in a few seconds whether to run at a man with a gun. Whether they can do that is decided right now, months out, in what you buy them and what you make them train on and whether you let them be seen for who they are.

Plates and a rifle go in the vehicles of the people qualified to run them. Your team comes off the subcompacts. Trauma kits go at every post, junctional tourniquets go in those kits, and everybody goes through Stop the Bleed. Your parking team gets trained, armed where the law allows it, and visible. And you rehearse the moment police come through the door, so that nobody on your side gets shot by the good guys.

AJ Scott is going to be out of work for months. His wife is taking time away from her job to take care of him. If this article was useful to you, go put something in the fund that has been set up for him:

Leave a comment and tell me what your team is going to change this week. Then send this to your pastor and your team leader.

Copyright © 2026 Keith Graves. All rights reserved.