Via Bob Owens of Bearing Arms, I’m … pretty sure I understand it, although you can see why a heartbroken parent or sibling would have trouble sorting it out given the tender age of the boys involved. Plain and simple: What was the homeowner supposed to do differently? She’s in her late 60s and had been burgled twice before, including by one of the kids who ended up dead in this confrontation. She was so terrified of how things might escalate next time, given the sense of impunity they obviously felt in targeting her, that she asked her seventysomething brother to stay with her. The facts aren’t entirely clear but it sounds like he’s the one who fired the fatal shots. If he hadn’t, there might well have been a fight between two senior citizens and two young teens armed with God knows what. How do you like the odds on that one? Better yet, how would you like a law that says you can’t fire at someone who’s confronting you in your home unless you know for a fact that the intruder’s carrying a gun himself?

The only wrinkle here is what the sister of one of the teens said: “They were on their way out the door.” Not sure how she knows that, unless she’s making an assumption based on the fact that some of the bullets went through the door. I wonder what would happen if it turned out that the boys were shot in the back instead of the chest. In most home invasion cases, the politics of charging a homeowner with using excessive force in self-defense would be poisonous, especially when the homeowner’s as sympathetic as this one. But given the age of the teens, maybe prosecutors will take a closer look.