re: So the employee that shot the robber is in custody

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you're talking to a moron. logic won't work.

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Is it morally wrong to choke someone to death that was intent on Murder. That is your democrat/communist position.

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If horse theft was punishable by death then it should follow that theft of the modern day iron horse should carry the same penalty.

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What in the world? Come on, guys, engage on the issue at least a little bit. I haven’t personally attacked anyone and am just discussing this scenario abstractly.

We’re discussing an employee that shot someone smashing a case from across the room. There’s no evidence that the employee’s very life depended on keeping the items in that case from being stolen. For the sake of our conversation, and consistent with the video, as far as i can tell, there was no immediate threat to anyone’s life. So, we’re merely discussing whether it’s justifiable to shoot someone to prevent the theft of an item.

This whole “horse thieves” got shot back in the day proposition. No one has referenced a law that prescribed the death penalty for horse thieves or examples where the death penalty was applied at a formal trial for theft of a horse. I’m sure there were plenty of lynchings for horse thieves. Are you all sure that you want to hold up lynchings as the standard for whether thieves deserve to die?

Others have suggested that if one’s livelihood depends on the item being stolen, then that justifies shooting the thief. Someone suggested a car is the equivalent of a horse. Ignoring the fact that that argument is relying on past lynchings as justification, how does one propose that the theft of a vehicle equates to the threat to life when millions of people somehow continue to live in America, much less around the world, without a vehicle? I’m sure we can come up with a scenario where one is stranded in a remote location and the theft of one’s vehicle would leave him exposed to the elements, but that extreme scenario is hardly what’s being discussed here.

Others have suggested that theft represents the taking of one’s time, the time it took to earn enough money to purchase the item being stolen. While true, where’s the sense of proportion? Some finite amount of one’s hours being stolen justifies the taking of ALL of the thief’s hours of life until his death? For that matter, how do we deal with fraud and other crimes where money is stolen? Same functional effect as stealing property, but we don’t execute fraudsters.

When has the taking of a life ever been morally justified in response to the taking of property? If the answer is never, then we are forced to look for a justification in this particular shooting by appealing to some threat to life. Someone suggested if the thief was willing to violently smash the case, then he must be willing to use violence against a person and it’s okay to shoot him before there is ever an actual threat to a person. I’m not particularly bothered by the fact that this particular thief got shot, but I can’t exactly articulate, with any intellectual honesty, in this specific case with that specific video, what action actually demonstrated a threat to life.