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1. It wasn't ironic. You stop violent animal scum with force because they aren't civilized enough to listen to reason. You don't reason with the wolf coming to your henhouse to take your chickens. You just stop it.
2. In terms of essentials, nothing is objectively essential, only essential in order to accomplish or avoid something else. In this case, I'm happy to define essential as "essential to live." Clothing, food, medicine. I still mildly object to looting this stuff for anything but personal or familial use, but it's pretty hard to tell a father with a starving kid that he can't have the food on the other side of that there window. We've all seen Les Miserables I'm sure. I can tell you that a plasma tv or someone's heirloom jewelry is not essential to anyone looting it.
3. I don't speak to the relatives of people who were accidentally or mistakenly shot any more than I speak to the relatives of those who were accidentally shot by police in the course of non-crisis police business or the relatives of those Iraqi civilians accidentally shot on a daily basis. If the bar for lethal force is "never use it because accidents can always happen", then I suggest you're not really living in a realistic world. I'd sure shoot someone who broke down my front door at night, risking the fact that he might just be some innocent drunk guy who thought he was at his house. Further, I'm happy to allow people to drive, even knowing that tens of thousands will be slain every year as a result of accidents while driving.
4. Looting != theft. Context matters, which is why it is called 'looting' in this case and not just 'thieving'. Taking other people's possessions out of sheer materialistic greed by brute force at a time of such extreme misery is so far beyond my notion of human being that I don't place any value on that person's life. I would happily use any means necessary to stop someone robbing my house or a friend's house. The presence of the incredible human suffering only makes the crime that much more reprehensible to me. Aside from rape, I have a hard time imagining anything more violating than someone breaking into the sanctuary that is my home.
Feel free to disagree with my moral system, though I'll point out that I'm happy to respect your moral system without resorting to insults.
--matt
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