Idaho's 'heroism': Salinas's automatic force masks systemic failure

By Sophie Naimi · Reporting from Paris ·

The language used by those who celebrate this American tragedy is sickeningly uniform: heroic, automatic, mechanical.

When "Automatic" Response Replaces Deliberate Action

The language used by those who celebrate this American tragedy is sickeningly uniform: heroic, automatic, mechanical. Jordan Salinas, a healthcare worker in Idaho, returned fire on Chad Williams at an In-N-Out Burger, actions that authorities—including Twin Falls police chief Matthew Hicks and county sheriff Jack Johnson—have lauded as "true heroism." The narrative, repeated across outlets like The Guardian and aljazeera.com, is one of the citizen savior: a man who trained after a 2021 Boise shooting to confront an attacker he reasoned would target "soft" people, citing his brother in a wheelchair. He reportedly felt "no fear," following four steps—observe, orient, decide, act—in what he described as an "automatic" impulse.

But the moment we elevate this calculated response into moral virtue, we are doing far more than praising bravery; we are celebrating the normalization of lethal force. We are applauding a deeply trained, militarized reaction to systemic failure. The facts are stark: Williams killed three people and wounded seven others in a small Idaho city of 56,000 people. Salinas’s actions, while credited with "diverting the shooter" (idahostatesman.com), do not cleanse the moral stain left by the sheer abundance of weapons available to anyone who can afford the training.

The Illusion of Preparedness

The idea that rigorous firearm training—the kind required for Salinas's FN Five-Seven semi-automatic pistol—is a prophylactic against violence is a dangerous myth. It shifts the burden of state security onto the individual, demanding that every citizen be armed and trained to become their own first responder. This privatizes trauma and criminalizes self-defense into a performance of hyper-vigilance.

This compulsion toward immediate, overwhelming force has a historical echo: the transition from planned, nonviolent assertion to reactive survival. Consider the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. Those activists marched along the 54-mile route not with weapons, but with constitutional rights and moral conviction. Their confrontation was strategic, public, and entirely non-violent—a calculated demand for justice that forced a national reckoning leading to the Voting Rights Act. The shared mechanism is clear: the moment of crisis forces individuals into reactive survival modes, whether it’s running from police dogs in Alabama or drawing a suppressor in Idaho. In both cases, the state's failure to guarantee basic security—the right to vote, the right to life—is what necessitates the terrifying escalation.

The Geography of Violence and Neglect

We are meant to view this as an isolated incident of bad luck; I see it as a predictable symptom of profound structural neglect. We talk about climate injustice in terms of rising sea levels drowning low-lying island nations, but we must apply that same lens here: who bears the brunt of the violence when systems fail? It is always the poor, the marginalized, and those whose lives are deemed "soft targets."

The market will not price a burning planet; neither will American law or civic culture. We accept this cycle where the most vulnerable—the people in wheelchairs, the communities in the Global South, the working-class neighborhoods of Marseille—are perpetually exposed to the worst weather, the greatest danger, and the least help. The only thing truly automatic is the continuation of a system that treats violence as an acceptable background noise.

Sources

  1. The Guardian: Man who returned fire at In-N-Out gunman had done firearm training after 2021 mass shooting
  2. idahostatesman.com: Civilian returns fire during Idaho In‑N‑Out mass shooting | Idaho Statesman
  3. aljazeera.com: Who is Jordan Salinas, 'hero' bystander who confronted Idaho shooter ...
  4. thenote.app: Man who returned fire at In-N-Out gunman had done firearm training ...