It’s not about protection of property to me. I don’t care about that. I care about people having the right to use all reasonable options for defending themselves against violent attackers. And to your point, might this person’s death have been avoided if the occupants of the home had fled or hid somewhere? Certainly. But should they be legally required to do so? No, not in my opinion. Reason being, I don’t think the impetus should be on victims to take their attackers’ well-being into account when it’s the attackers that are creating the problem in the first place. Telling a person who is scared for their life that they need to fight the impulse coming from their amygdala to fight back against a violent attacker is totally unreasonable. If a person is coming at me with their fists and I have a gun, I don’t think I should have to refrain from firing my weapon and take the hits my attacker is throwing, just to make sure he doesn’t die. What if I die? What if I lose an eye or get my face scarred up? What if he takes my gun and shoots me? No. No, fuck that, if someone is attacking me, they’ve given me permission to defend myself in whatever way seems reasonable to me, and I’m not risking my own life or even just serious injury because someone else has anger management problems. They’re the problem; they’re the threat to society; if they die, yeah that sucks, but it’s their fucking fault, not mine for defending myself against their violent behavior.
I’m so sick of people having all this empathy for violent criminals, and way too little for their victims. You want to tell other people to react in a calm, collected, pacifist manner when they’re being attacked, to risk their own lives and wellbeing for the sake of their attacker’s? Tell you what, you get yourself attacked somehow when you’re not expecting it and demonstrate how cool, calm, and pacifist you are under fire; you show the rest of us how easy that is. You do that, and maybe I’ll consider what you have to say, but until then, you’re just a hand-wringing, pearl-clutching bystander who has their priorities messed up and doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.