Good citizen does his duty. (Exercising the Right).

At around 10 p.m. on November 2, 2002, Eric Endres of South Bend, Indiana, was walking his dogs in his yard when he heard glass breaking. He investigated and noticed a man emerging from a nearby computer store with an armload of goods.

Endres, a self-employed contractor, retrieved a handgun from his home, then went to the store, where he found the thief still in the doorway. He recalled for the November 4th South Bend Tribune: "I stopped about 10 feet away from him and ordered him: 'Don't move. Drop everything in your arms.' The man turned and started walking towards me. As loud and clear as I could, I said, 'Don't move. Don't move.' He got to be about four paces from me when he held up a pry bar over his head. He was close enough that he could've hit me with it. I was a little scared at this point. I was yelling clear commands.... I fired a shot over his head and he froze."

Endres ordered the man to the ground (he meekly complied), then began waving his arms and yelling in the hope of flagging a passing motorist who could call police on a cell phone. None stopped, but as described by the Tribune, "a man in full Halloween drag, wearing an all-black nylon suit with a skull and crossbones on the front, sauntered up to the scene and said, 'What's going on, dude?'" When Endres implored him to seek help, the man stopped a pizza delivery car whose driver called police.

When officers arrived, they only knew that a shot had been fired. Mistakenly assuming that Endres was the culprit (he was still holding the robber at gunpoint), they ordered him to drop the gun and cuffed him. But after listening to his account of what happened and confirming it with witnesses, they released him. "After they sorted it out," he told the Tribune, "police were very appreciative and said ...