I wanted this to be about Spider-Man but actually it's about a mass shooting. (I'm fine. And also didn't do it if that's where your mind went.)

I'm going to be hitting your inbox up a lot this month.

Hey cats and kittens,

I decided a week ago to do something this August where I would send a newsletter out every day. I get in my own head and shit happens and I go too long without writing things I think are Worth Writing About™ so I figured a good way to get myself out of the habit was to commit to a daily situation for a month. Traditionally, when I just send you guys things so they can be sent, people unsubscribe, but not sending things also tends to trigger that! So while acknowledging that I retain the right to abandon this experiment if everyone unsubscribes, I am going to try and do it.

The idea is that I am not going to fret over the fact that a lot of these are just loose thoughts, the way I usually do. That’s not to say they’ll just be me rambling as unthinkingly as I do on Twitter, but they’ll be closer to that. I am still going to, like, think about these for at least five seconds, which I don’t do on Twitter. But I am not going to throw away ten thousand words just because it occurs to me I should read a book from the 19th century which might change my mind, the way I normally do for long pieces on this Substack.

This is ironically sort of a funny one to begin with, because it accidentally is a bit of a big, deeply unfunny subject I hadn’t intended on rambling about without thinking about it a bunch, but here we are. Life comes at you fast.

The first one was going to be about Spider-Man: Brave New Day. I was going to wake up this morning and drive 70 miles to see it and then on the drive back I would come up with some neat takes in my brain and write them down and hit send before midnight.

But last night I couldn’t sleep and I stayed up reading about something else and decided that I would make that the first post. That will now be a later post. So too will Spider-Man.

If I had followed plan A today, I would have taken my time this morning, had breakfast, and begun driving towards Twin Falls at 10am. I would have gotten there a bit after 11 and probably gone to the 11:40am showing. It’s 2 hours and 15 minutes, and given 15 minutes for previews, I probably would have walked out at 2:20ish. As I drove out of the parking lot, I would have noticed that to my surprise the In-N-Out in Twin that has been in the works for two years had finally opened. I would have driven the hundred yards and gotten in the drive-thru line. If I had incredibly bad luck, I would then 10 minutes later find myself at the center of a mass shooting.

There was a mass shooting today at the In-N-Out that opened a week ago in Twin Falls. It happened at 2:30pm in the drive-thru. As I write this, two people are confirmed dead in addition to the shooter, and more people are injured at St. Luke’s. If god is nice and everyone pulls through, this will not become the first entry for the state of Idaho in the Mother Jones mass shooting database, which uses rigorous standards mirroring the FBI and only includes single-location incidents that result in 3 or more fatalities not counting the shooter at a public location. If doctors at St. Luke’s can’t save them all, then it will become the first Idaho entry in that database I used to help promote and worked on stories about.

Now, it is important to point out that even if I had gone to that showing and had walked out and gone to In-N-Out across the street, I still probably wouldn’t have been one of the cars in line with the shooter when it happened. Even in this scenario where I did everything I didn’t do, I probably am not in the situation where my eyes go like saucers and I see this guy in front of me pull out an assault rifle and start shooting In-N-Out employees and walk into the parking lot to shoot some cars, come back, and get out a new long gun from his trunk.

But I might have been!

We’re no longer in the “this is something that could never happen” thing anymore. Now it’s just a roll of dice about what side of 2:30 I get through that drive-thru.

So it’s only reasonable to wonder what I would have thought if I had been sitting in my cherry red Miata when I saw the shooter pull out his rifle in the row of cars in front of me and start shooting innocent people. And I would have thought “Ben, why have you insisted on renting guns every time you go to the range instead of just buying one even though it would be way cheaper?”

Like, I 100% would have thought that. I have in fact spent the last few years spending too much money on my gun hobby because I am uncomfortable with owning a gun, so I have to rent them and this creates massive logistic headaches.

None of which is to say that if I had bought a gun a few years ago, it would have helped me! It would have been in my trunk, which I don’t have direct access to. If I somehow snuck around and got it out of my trunk, I still would be just some moron with a pistol who would probably be too afraid to do anything, or at least too afraid to do anything right. If I was somehow so high on adrenaline and so good and so lucky that I didn’t instantly get shot the second I tried to do something, I would risk shooting a civilian by accident. There are a million reasons why granting me every coin flip, the world still isn’t better if I am armed in that drive-thru.

But that doesn’t change the fact that if I was in that drive-thru I would curse myself for not being armed.

The left loves to talk about this exact situation—good guy with a gun—in terms of probabilities. It is exceedingly unlikely. Crossfire leads to stray bullets which leads to more death. The thought that you might one day be in a situation where you will pull out a gun and save the day leads people to have loaded guns at the ready more and that leads to more gun-related suicides which cause way more gun deaths than anything else.

But the left also focuses on mass shootings. It is incredibly unlikely you will be involved in a mass shooting. But it’s terrifying to think about, so we end up with people having irrational nightmares about them happening at their workplace or their child’s school or whatever. The left doesn’t invent this fear. Humans don’t need prompting to do this, but it does contribute to it when—for similarly human reasons—we focus on them so much.

But being at the site of a mass shooting is incredibly unlikely. Being a victim of a mass shooting is incredibly unlikely. Being a victim of a mass shooting who dies is incredibly unlikely. Being at the site of a mass shooting where you are armed is incredibly unlikely. Being armed at a site of a mass shooting where you do the right thing and save the day is incredibly unlikely. But by the time this paragraph begins we are in the realm of things that probability says will not happen to you.

And in that moment, in that drive-thru, of course you want to have a gun.

It appears that in this case, it was good someone did.

Nothing has been confirmed so who knows, but from the video available and the witness accounts, some guy just happened to also be armed and engaged the shooter. The reports do not say he killed the bad guy—the Jerome police chief says the shooter probably killed himself but again, unconfirmed—but they do say he survived longer than the bad guy and helped with the victims while the police came, which suggests he forced the shooter into a gunfight and stopped him from walking around and executing people.

He has a silencer for one, but also he is just standing out there shooting at this guy with no concealment. Which seems to suggest he is not an off-duty cop or retired marine. He seems to be someone who is making lots of mistakes here but also happens to have a silenced handgun at the moment of a mass shooting.

And yet if the police confirm the accounts, then this guy is a hero and deserves the key to the city! He would be the best example possible of the right’s alleged “good guy with a gun.”

Those almost never happen, but sometimes they do.

There is a whole level of looking at probabilities here. How likely the fear of a good guy with a gun is to stop villains from shooting people while counting down the police response time. The left and right have been arguing about those stats for a long time, and I don’t particularly give a shit.

My point is: if I had gone to that movie and been in that drive-thru, I would have wanted to be able to have personal agency. I would want to do something instead of waiting to get shot.

You know, I always have thought that if I’m on a plane and it crashes, c’est la vie. I’ve never been afraid of flying. But I have a huge fear of boats. I have only been on one cruise. I was 10 with my dad and I hated it so much that I wrote a note to my dad explaining why I had taken my passport and left in the dead of night, explaining I was scared but couldn’t tell him, and though I didn’t take my passport in the dead of night, my dad did find this note and to help me sleep gave me an Ambien, which prompted me to hallucinate and need the ship’s doctor.

My problem with ships has always been, if it starts sinking, I will have no agency, but I will have the illusion of agency. I will scramble for a lifeboat or whatever. On a plane, it blows up, that’s death.

If I’m in a drive-thru and the guy in front of me pulls out an AR-15 and shoots the employee, it’s not the plane and it’s not the boat. It’s not instant, and it’s not fake agency—it’s real agency, sitting right there, that I probably won’t use well or at all. And I’ll have time to know that’s what’s happening.

I am not saying I am about to buy a gun tomorrow. In fact, I definitely won’t (for one because I am about to move out of Idaho and it won’t be such a weird “I was choosing to spend money on rentals even though it was cheaper just to buy because I am a lib who doesn’t like the thought of owning a gun”). But I definitely do think that when the left constantly talks about how crazy and absurd it is to want to have a gun just in case, that it ignores how utterly human this thought is. And how it just also isn’t absurd.

If you want to argue “gun violence never happens outside of gang violence so this is all nothing to worry about,” then fine, right-winger, you can argue that. But you’re constantly going to be hit with examples of how it’s not absurd.

And if you, left winger, aren’t willing to say “this mass shooting, while tragic, will almost certainly not happen to you personally, dear reader,” then you’re not a perfect objectivity robot just working the number, either.

Which is a long way of saying: If I still had worked at Mother Jones when this happened, they could have sold tickets to the fight we would have had about how to cover it.

See you tomorrow,

Ben