OK: Charge against Wyandotte man dismissed: "Ottawa County prosecutors dismiss a first-degree murder charge against a Wyandotte man after authorities determined that the shooting was self-defense. Twenty-one-year-old Michael Anthony Morrison was charged May 2nd in the shooting death of Keith Alexander Gordon. Gordon was found on a Wyandotte road with a gunshot wound to the face. U-S marshals arrested Morrison in Kansas City, Kansas, and he returned to Miami in October. District Attorney Eddie Wyant says an investigation revealed that Gordon was running at Morrison with a belt-like vest containing several shotgun shells, knives and machetes. Wyant says Gordon's relatives removed the vest from his body and hid it in their home nearby. Witnesses say Morrison grabbed his gun from his vehicle and shot Gordon when he began running at him with a machete in his hand."


The gun heard 'round the West: "A famous ad that most boy baby boomers will recall from Boys' Life, the old scouting magazine, showed a happy lad, carrot-topped and freckly like any number of Peck's Bad Boys, his teeth haphazardly arrayed within his wide, gleeful mouth under eyes wide as pie platters as he exclaimed on Christmas morn, 'Gee, Dad ... A Winchester!' All gone, all gone, all gone. The gun as family totem, the implied trust between generations, the implicit idea that marksmanship followed by hunting were a way of life to be pursued through the decades, the sense of tradition, respect, self-discipline and bright confidence that Winchester and the American kinship group would march forward to a happy tomorrow -- gone ... if not with the wind, then with the tide of inner-city and nut-case killings that have led America's once-proud and heavily bourgeois gun culture into the wilderness of marginalization."