You raise valid points and add a reminder of the criminals' humanity that we seem to forget about when many in this thread are obsession about retribution. Unfortunately all of your solutions are not applicable when these people are seconds away from causing grievous bodily harm and are in the middle of invading your home. The fight and will to survive is paramount.
That being said, the solution to deal with these people during a crime in progress while they are in your home is with a gun and willingness to defend one's self. There is no time to think about helping these misguided folks back to morality and rehabilitating them. While both of our lives might be precious as you point out, in this situation it comes down to me vs them. This sort of dehumanization is essential for the good guys to survive and respond with deadly force rather than an olive branch.
As I stated before, based on my knowledge of this situation, I believe the homeowner took a legal and appropriate action. I cannot say whether it was the
best action, but no one facing reasonable imminent threat should be restricted in taking action to defend themselves.
But I do not see this as an incompatibility with my other statements.
Sometimes it is right as a doctor to withdrawal treatments which are not prolonging meaningful life. Sometimes it is right to respect someone's choice to refuse an intervention that you think is actually in their interest. Sometimes it's important to restrict someone from a treatment that they want but whose risks endanger them unnecessarily beyond the benefit (if any). These are not things that are easy to do, and you can in fact do them more easily if you lie to yourself and say that their life is no longer important, that they are an idiot and deserve the suffering they choose, that they are a drug-seeking asshole and don't respect you, etc. While those are preferable to refusing to let go, forcing treatment on someone who has capacity to refuse, and granting an addict their fix, none of these solutions are humane.
If we wish to progress as a society, we can do so by making the right choice
and accepting that the right choice comes with suffering -- if we share it when we have the power to do so, perhaps another will share your suffering in kind when they have the power to do so.
But maybe you haven't had the experience of being truly
with someone and their family in the final moments of their life, of seeing someone who was making serial bad decisions come back to you in the future and say they've turned their life around because you were the first person to ever respect their authority to make their own choices without avoiding the feeling they were going to go badly, or to have someone break down and share with you how hard it is to face the realization that they can't live without feeling tethered to a substance.
Those experiences don't always go so well. Sometimes you get torn a new asshole. But if someone is so terrified to face reality that they are willing to rip you to shreds to avoid it, does it not validate their suffering and your compassion even more?
This is the stuff of life. I
hate that our society has come to a point where we can avoid so much unpleasantness that we can carry out biological function without the very experiences that make us human. Pardon me for fighting for the thing that we are so frequently lacking.
Haven't you wondered why disability is exploding, opioid epidemic, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, suicide, etc.? Perhaps something repressed is making itself known.