Last week, an armed robbery in Houston didn’t quite go the way the bad guy intended. He was shot and killed by an armed citizen in the restaurant the bad guy had targeted.

However, by the time police got there, the armed individual was gone. They’ve been looking for him ever since.

Now, he’s ready to talk to the police.

The Houston Police Department said an attorney who claimed to be representing the customer who shot and killed a man who robbed a southwest Houston restaurant last week reached out to them and said his client is ready to talk.

The incident happened just before 11:30 p.m. Thursday at Ranchito Taqueria on S. Gessner near Bellaire Boulevard.

HPD had been looking for the man who was seen on surveillance video shooting the robber. The man is not charged with a crime, but police said they wanted to talk to him to find out his side of the story.

Now, this is going to be interesting. While authorities say he’s not charged with a crime, the truth is that he may well end up arrested over his actions.

The media has focused a lot on the fact that the bad guy here had a fake gun. To me, that’s completely irrelevant. Unless it was an orange, transparent water gun or something of that sort, it’s unlikely the man in question would have been able to ascertain whether it was a real firearm or not.

No, that’s not what may work against him.

Instead, that’s the fact that, at least according to the video of the shooting, the armed citizen continued to fire after the threat had ended. That includes putting a round in the guy after what appears to be removing his gun.

Up until then, I could probably argue justification, even firing rounds into the prone body–we can’t see if, for example, the gun hand tried to move or whatever–but at that point, it crosses a line.

Now, it’s entirely possible that police in Houston won’t care about that. They might figure that since everything up to that point was justified, that didn’t really matter. Hell, the guy might have already been dead, so it really wouldn’t matter.

But on the flip side, they could just as easily say he’s not charged with a crime, but then we find out that it was only because law enforcement didn’t have a name to put on the arrest warrant.

I can see it going either way, though I’m not very comfortable with firing rounds into people after the threat is over and frankly, neither should anyone else.

The media is fixated on the fake gun, but it’s funny that there’s a potentially real issue that they’re completely ignoring. In a way, it shows just how poorly the media understands firearms, self-defense issues, and a host of other factors that were part of this story. As a result, their coverage on this is even worse than it normally might be.

Then again, it’s the mainstream media, so…