I am highly uncertain about everything I argue in this post.

Did you know your government has determined the monetary value of a human life?

Many people feel squeamish about this upon learning about it for the first time. But this is an unavoidable reality for modern governments. States spend a lot of money trying to keep their citizens alive, often despite those citizens’ best efforts.

But states don’t have infinite resources, and they have other responsibilities besides life-saving, such as making sure nobody opens cute little businesses in areas zoned residential. In order to compare different life-saving interventions, the government has put a dollar amount on each life saved. Programs that come in under that dollar amount are, in theory, moved to the top of the funding queue.

Australia sets the Value of a Statistical Life at 5.7 million AUD. The British treasury’s Value of a Prevented Fatality is 2 million GBP. In the U.S., each agency determines its own number, currently ranging from 7.5 million to ~13 million+ USD according to ChatGPT.

Enter Ahmed al-Ahmed

Last Sunday (December 14, 2025), two men armed with rifles and shotguns unleashed terror and death on a beach in NSW, Australia, apparently targeting a Hanukkah celebration. So far, 16 victims have died, with forty more injured and a few in unstable condition. In my home state of Colorado, we call this a Wednesday but apparently it is not common in Australia.

During the shooting, an unarmed bystander with no combat or self-defense training rushed one of the shooters, successfully wrestling the gun away from him, before being shot by the other gunman several times. This was shortly before the first police arrived. After an extended shootout, one attacker was killed and the other critically wounded.

As far as I can tell, Ahmed was the last person besides the attackers to be shot, meaning his intervention to stop the killing likely saved lives. Amazingly, all of this was caught on video.

A heroic moment…

Watching Ahmed rush up towards the gunman for the first time was exhilarating, even when the headline above the video told me how it would end. Seeing someone display that kind of courage is moving and inspiring. I wanted him to succeed and not get hurt and every little moment of uncertainty sent pangs through my gut.

I also want to think that I would do the same thing. I feel this way generally, but especially when watching someone else do it– or watching them fail to do it. I imagine most people feel this way but I know of at least one:

I got to watch some deputy sheriffs performing this weekend, they weren’t exactly medal of honor winners, alright. The way they performed was frankly disgusting… You know, I really believe, you don’t know until you’re tested but I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon. And I think most of the people in this room would have done that too, because I know most of you. –DJT

I suspect that Ahmed’s heroic video being shared around the world has a positive effect, making it more likely that other people will find similar courage if they ever find themselves in a similar situation.

… and a long recovery

But that effect might be balanced out by the next photos we saw of Ahmed.

On one hand, that’s cool, he got visited by the governor. Later, the Australian prime minister visited him, too.

On the other hand… damn. He looks like shit.

Getting shot fucking sucks. Assault weapons are designed to do massive damage to bodies. They don’t just poke a little hole. The shockwave from a high-caliber bullet tears apart organs and shatters bones far outside the bullet’s direct path, leaving an exit wound the size of a large citrus fruit.

These wounds are basically guaranteed to be life-altering in some way. With several hits to the shoulder and arm, Ahmed will spend weeks in the hospital undergoing multiple surgeries. It will take months before he can return to work, and years before he sees the last of pain, weakness, and limited range of motion, if ever.

I don’t know about you, but I try to take really good care of my body. I eat healthy and go to the gym ~5 days a week. Getting shot would substantially interfere with my fitness goals. As a young Ice Cube so astutely pointed out, “shotgun bullets are bad for your health.”

Ice Cube wanted you to check yourself, whereas I think the government should give you the check. (Hey, I tried.)

Keep in mind, all of this was a relatively fortunate outcome. A few inches difference was the only thing that kept Ahmed from dying right there on Bondi Beach.

Now, I don’t have kids and I’m philosophically confused about the badness of death, so the prospect of being maimed or permanently paralyzed is much more terrifying to me. But Ahmed had a wife and two young daughters. I’m pretty sure that if I had two daughters, I’d be more worried about their impoverishment and the trauma of losing their father than about my ability to keep upping by bench press.

If the initial video of Ahmed inspired me to run outside and rush at the first mass shooter I see, this photo poured cold water on the flames.

Enter giant bags of cash

The last thing we want people thinking if they have an opportunity to stop a shooting is “who will take care of my daughters?”

There is an obvious solution to this. The next image we see of Ahmed and his family should be his episode of MTV Cribs.

People who risk their lives to stop mass shooters should be massively rewarded. How massively? Well, the Value of a Statistical Life would be a good start. The government is already willing to pay millions of dollars per life saved. We can’t know exactly how many lives Ahmed saved, but there are decent theoretical reasons to think that on average, the shooting would have gone on twice as long if he hadn’t stopped it.

Mass casualty events like shootings follow heavy-tailed distributions: most incidents have just a few deaths, while a small number of large ones account for a disproportionate share of total deaths. These distributions have a counterintuitive property: the longer an event has already lasted, the longer you should expect it to continue, because the more likely it becomes that you find yourself in the long tail. Mathematically, your best estimate is that you’re roughly at the halfway point. This means that intervention at any moment, on average, prevents as many deaths as have already occurred.

If you accept this reasoning, Ahmed saved 16 lives in expectation. At the Australian government’s going rate for lives saved, that’s $91.2 million AUD (about $60 million USD.) There are various problems with this exact way of determining the dollar amount and I’m not the right person to try to solve them, but I don’t think this is off by more than an order of magnitude.

I expect this proposal to be uncontroversial. First, it just feels right. Ahmed al-Ahmed is the truest kind of badass. Not the much lamer kind of badass from movies who leaps into dangerous situations only when they have superpowers and plot armor, but a real badass who risks his life and his daughters’ orphaning with nothing but his unremarkable, flabby, middle-aged human body. He deserves to never regret that decision.

Second, this would save lives. If every time there was a mass shooting, people knew that tackling the shooter to the ground could make them and their families never have to work again, you’d get a lot more tackled shooters. From the government’s standpoint, this is a great return on investment, because they only have to pay out once lives have already been saved.

Addressing all your questions and objections

You’re probably already on the phone telling your congressperson to pass a law like this, in which case, please proceed. But if for some reason you aren’t convinced, I will now fix that, by addressing objections in order from most common to least.

First: shouldn’t all that money be spent on shrimp welfare instead?

Ideally, yes. But the government isn’t going to do that. They’re also probably not going to spend it on saving lives in the developing world, where it is much cheaper to prevent a death or otherwise dramatically improve someone’s quality of life. Governments in rich countries are already spending this kind of money trying to keep their own citizens alive, this is just a proposal about how they should spend some of it.

Isn’t the actual solution better gun control or mental health or something?

Probably, but these are not mutually exclusive.

Would this make people fake mass shootings to cash in on the prize?

That sure would be evil, but someone would need to volunteer to die or go to prison for life. I guess someone could try to manipulate someone else into doing a mass shooting in order to be there at the right time and stop them, but I think it would be quite hard to do this without leaving evidence?

Should police officers be eligible?

My first thought is, probably not, because in the case of police the government has already spent the money. Cops are signing up to a certain chance of finding themselves in a situation like this in exchange for an otherwise comfy job and relatively high salary. Essentially, this is about compensating people who take on the responsibilities of police officers when they don’t even have to, and at great risk/cost to themselves.

Are you sure we want to incentivize shooter tackling?

This is the best objection. Thanks to this annoying objection, I’m at most 60% sure that any of this is a good idea. Official guidance mostly wants people to just run and hide, especially if they realistically have no chance of disarming the shooter. In theory, we could address this by setting the reward amount just high enough to incentivize people who actually have a good enough chance of stopping the shooter. In practice, people might have a hard time performing these expected value calculations in the midst of a mass shooting.

What actions would be eligible?

This could really get into the details of how to implement such a program, which I am not going to do. The government presumably has math people for this. Roughly, I think:

People(‘s families) should still get paid if they are maimed or killed in a failed attempt. I admit this could get messy with everyone claiming their dead family members must have been trying to tackle the shooter.

Purely in terms of incentives, you would want to pay just as much for clever interventions that disrupt the violence without putting the person’s life at risk.

There’s no reason not to apply this to various other crimes. We already do a version of this with rewards for information about wanted suspects.

One more objection

Mass shootings are a poignant example of the way news coverage distorts our sense of reality: despite wall-to-wall coverage, they affect a tiny number of people. Since every post about a mass shooting could instead be about global poverty or factory farming (my usual focus), it might seem like scope insensitivity to write about this at all. In case that’s your objection, I will now tie it back to those other issues.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the misaligned incentives in traditional philanthropy. I’ve spent my career working in and founding nonprofit organizations advocating for farmed animals, and I’ve seen firsthand how tenuous the relationship is between making a real difference and convincing people to give you money.

One solution to this is outcome-based philanthropy. In the limit, this can take the form of things like bounties or market shaping, where rather than funding nonprofits based on proposed projects, funders promise to pay out money to whoever can achieve a stated outcome. For instance, governments can promise to pay a set rate per dose for effective treatments for a rare disease in cases where there wouldn’t otherwise be enough of a market incentive for pharmaceutical companies to develop a drug.

There are various kinds of campaigns and philanthropic programs that couldn’t easily be funded this way. Which just makes it all the more exciting when we get a straightforward opportunity like this to pay for the outcomes we want. I’ve got a more deeply thought-out post about aligning philanthropic incentives in the works.

In the meantime, if you have any contacts in the Australian government, let’s make it happen?

Chris Minns, I fixed it for ya