Raikas said:
I think this is a good example of that cultural difference that makes the whole gun thing seem so alien to a lot of non-Americans.
It's a way of looking at it that I have a hard time getting my head around, and yet it seems to be such a common way of looking at it - I have cousins in the US who say the same thing, but it's just baffling to me (and I hunt, so I'm not even at the extreme that a lot of other people are with the issue).
This discrepancy in the end boils down to one thing:
Belief in personal responsibility is a thing in American culture.
What I mean by that, is that Americans tend to believe that when a person acts, they accept all of the potential consequences of that act, and that they are therefore responsible for the outcome.
In this particular discussion, the line of thought you are so confused by is less "I will kill to protect my possessions" and more "The idiot that is trying to rob me has created a situation where he will die". That's the key difference that is so mystifying to people who don't know the culture at all. Americans are perfectly willing to draw a line and say "if you cross this line, the consequences are on your own head", while most other cultures I have been exposed to tend toward "if you cross this line, I am equally responsible for driving you to do so".
That same attitude infuses pretty much all of American culture and if you're looking for it, you can spot it all over the place. It's one of the primary reasons American social programs tend to lag far behind other Western nations, why the poor are generally derided and the rich/successful are glorified. For better or worse, Americans as a whole believe that one's circumstances are a result of one's own choices and that one is responsible for all of it.
Therefore, the responsibility for the death, in this particular example, is not on the shooter, but on the one who instigated the confrontation.
Now, I won't pretend I know if this is an inherently good or bad perspective, but it
is the American one. Hopefully it makes more sense to you now.