Remember the officers’ appreciation of Rory Vertigan’s actions the next time you hear some anti-gunner saying, “The cops don’t want private citizens to carry guns.”

Texas state Rep. Suzanna Gratia-Hupp is recognized worldwide as one of the leading advocates for an individual’s right to carry a concealed firearm. Several years ago, while testifying in opposition to additional gun control legislation, she related the emotional account of how she lost both of her parents to a lone gunman in 1991. At the time of the attack, Texas did not allow private citizens to carry concealed.

Seattle knew Edward McMichael by sight or sound, the bespectacled guy with the wispy beard and floppy Uncle Sam and Dr. Seuss hats. For decades he breathed life into his shiny brass instrument, outside city sports venues.

On Oct. 25, police say, McMichael, 53, was near a bus stop in the 500 block of Mercer Street when thugs attacked, beating and robbing him after midnight. He was taken to the hospital for head wounds and was home recovering. But he died sometime Sunday or early Monday.

Prior to enactment of the law, Kennesaw had a population of just 5,242 but a crime rate significantly higher (4,332 per 100,000) than the national average (3,899 per 100,000). The latest statistics available – for the year 2005 – show the rate at 2,027 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the population has skyrocketed to 28,189.

By comparison, the population of Morton Grove, the first city in Illinois to adopt a gun ban for anyone other than police officers, has actually dropped slightly and stands at 22,202, according to 2005 statistics. More significantly, perhaps, the city’s crime rate increased by 15.7 percent immediately after the gun ban, even though the overall crime rate in Cook County rose only 3 percent.

Four teenagers have been charged in connection with the incident early Sunday morning along an isolated dirt road in Mont Vernon, a town of about 2,000.

In a news release Tuesday, the New Hampshire Department of Justice identified the victim as 42-year-old Kimberly Cates. The medical examiner determined that she died from “multiple sharp injuries to the head, torso, left arm, and left leg.”

The victim’s 10-year-old daughter sustained serious knife injuries that required hours of surgery.

Yale University graduate student Annie Le, whose body was found in the basement wall of an off-campus medical research building, was strangled, a spokesman for the Connecticut medical examiner’s office said Wednesday.

The cause of death was “traumatic asphyxia due to neck compression,” the spokesman said. The office would not release the spokesman’s name.

Le, 24, a pharmacology student, was last seen alive September 8, the day she appeared in a surveillance video entering a four-story lab at 10 Amistad St., about 10 blocks from the main campus.

Her body was found Sunday, on what was to have been her wedding day.