KitKat 
I don't think its cool to be trespassing. What does it say about the law when people are fully aware of it, yet break it anyway?Originally Posted by XanBcoo
In all seriousness, though, imagine yourself in that old guy's position. Say you see a bunch of guys sneaking around stealing your friend's personal stuff. You call the authorities, but it's very likely that by the time they arrive, the thieves will be long gone. What do you do? If your answer is "sit and wait," then I'm going to have to accuse you of either being naive in thinking everything will pan out just fine, or being a coward because confrontation is scary.
So let's say you decide to confront them. Now you're in a situation where either:
A) the suspects surrender
B) the suspects flee
C) the suspects attack
Sure, surrender would be ideal, but you don't know what's going on through their heads. You don't even know what they're carrying or what they're capable of. Unless you're going out there with a weapon, I highly doubt they'll surrender, so you need to be in a position of power before you can even challenge them. Now you have a weapon, and the targets might also have weapons, and now the situation escalades.
This is basically exactly what happened as far as the story narrated. The old guy didn't sound like he was Yosemite Sam waiting for the chance to shoot up some varmints. He was in a state of panic and knew he had to do something. He found himself in a dangerous position and reacted the way he felt he needed to in order to dissolve the conflict. Sure, he could've just shot them in the legs, but I wasn't there, so I'm not going to make that call.
Honestly, I think its really easy for any of us to just sit here in our warm comfy rooms sipping on chai tea lattes and argue that justice always prevails and that the system will keep us safe. Meanwhile we watch on as 15 year old girls get raped, or allow our planes full of passengers to be hijacked just because a couple guys brought box-cutters onboard, all because we're not "certified law enforcers." I think it's awesome to see a community look out for one another, and it was brave of someone to risk their life to protect someone else's possessions, and its arrogant to believe that if you suddenly found yourself in a similar position, you would be able to handle the situation like any upstanding saturday-morning cartoon superhero.
