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

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Are we talking legally justifiable, or morally justifiable?

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I’m not sure it’s justifiable legally or morally.

Legally, most statutes I’ve seen require some reasonable perception of a threat of death or great bodily harm before the use of deadly force in self defense is justified. I haven’t seen an argument of how the employee could have reasonably perceived such a threat. At best, some have suggested smashing the case means the thief would be willing to use violence against the employee or that the threat of force to chase away the thief means the thief would return for revenge. In the absence of some overt action or verbal communication by the thief in support of those scenarios, I’m not sure these endeavors to read the mind of the thief would rise to the level of justification of shooting him right there. It doesn’t seem to fit into the scenarios provided in the Louisiana statute for justifiable homicide. Justifiable Homicide (La Legis)

Morally, as i discussed, there is not an equivalence when taking a life in retaliation for the taking of property. Should the victim be entitled to deprive a thief of more hours of life than was taken from him?

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I think it should be both. When you are weighing life vs value of property, it is the thief that valued his own life at less than the value of the property.

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Well, we aren’t exactly discussing how much the thief valued his life. The thief didn’t make the choice to introduce deadly force against a person in this scenario (for the sake of discussion, the video doesn’t show an overt threat). Further, and this is the point i tried to make with hypotheticals earlier, how far does your logic extend? If the taking of a $10,000 piece of jewelry justifies execution, does a $2,000 laptop? A $300 watch? A $50 video game? A $1 chocolate bar? If there is a specific value that justifies killing, does that value change compared to the net worth of the victim? Is the shooting only justified if there some damage to a case, but just grabbing something and running away would not justify shooting?

Point I’m making is that I don’t see how anyone justifies the position that all thefts are deserving of death. If we agree that some thefts don’t rise to a level of meriting death as a penalty, where is the dividing line between thefts that do and don’t deserve death?