Texas: Attempted robbery ends with shootout: "An attempted robbery outside a convenience store in north Houston on Friday afternoon ended in a shootout between the robber and his intended victim, police said. Both men were taken to hospitals and described as stable with gunshot wounds to their torsos following the shooting in front of Handi Food Mart in the 500 block of Yorkshire. According to police, the gunman approached the son of the store's owners in the parking lot and tried to rob him at gunpoint about 3:20 p.m. But the intended victim managed to pull out his gun, said Sgt. Robert Odom of HPD's homicide division. Several shots were fired and both men were wounded, Odom said. The suspect was taken to Memorial Hermann-The Texas Medical Center while the intended victim was taken to Ben Taub General Hospital, where he was in surgery. The names of both men were withheld."


Missouri: OK to shoot loony: :The prosecuting attorney in St. Charles County rules that the fatal shooting of a mentally ill man by his stepfather was justifiable homicide. Prosecutor Jack Banas says no charges will be filed against Dr. John Gentles in the death of his stepson, 26-year-old Marshall Fink. Banas says Gentles acted in self-defense. Fink was shot on Jan. 11. Banas says Fink had shown increasingly erratic and often violent behavior over the past 18 months, and relatives feared for their safety. His mother says Fink was bipolar and had lived at home since being discharged from the Navy because of his illness. Authorities say Fink threatened both his mother and stepfather on the day of the shooting."


Justice for gun owners: "Martin Luther King Jr. put it best: 'A right delayed is a right denied.' The lesson appears to have been lost on the Department of Justice and Solicitor General Paul D. Clement in the amicus curiae brief submitted recently for the government in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, which challenges the city's 31-year-old handgun ban, a horrible gun law that has had its day in court and lost. In a transparent exercise of political pandering, Clement and his colleagues named on the brief have strenuously, and correctly, argued that the Second Amendment protects an individual civil right, yet they insist that every restrictive gun law currently on the books should stand."