The threshold - legal and moral - is self-defense.
However, as everyone knows, LEOs regularly fill people with holes on self-defense arguments no other person but a LEO could even remotely get away with.
And I have always believed that non-LEOs should be given more leeway in “going too far” because of the fact that they are not trained in wartime threat from firearms, and so can easily have an emotional reaction that is excessively violent, paranoid or lethal, because of the condition the PERP put them in by threatening them. This is solely the perp’s fault.
But... when you have someone acting as cold-blooded and methodical as this guy did, the uttermost limits of even that emotional trauma argument are stretched to the breaking point.
The bottom line is that the guy - pay attention here - has every right to be a nasty, unbalanced, vindictive asshole in his own home, hurting no one. If someone chooses to repeatedly break in and terrorize someone that unstable, I don’t think he has any responsibility to become a psychologically balanced person before he takes care of the threat to his life (as he perceives it).
On the other hand, the law cannot allow people to look at visitors and say “I feel threatened by you” and blow them away for fun or psychosis reasons either. And while these two were certainly not mere visitors, and certainly were not invited, playing with the line of how far someone can go on their own property is beyond important.
So I’d say that what looks like an easy case in either direction (depending on your preference), is not, actually, so easy after all.
Exactly. It seems, from some things that I read here, that once they broke in, their lives were his to do with as he wished, and that if he'd, say, tortured them for a week before killing them, that would have been fine with some.