I’m relatively pro-gun but I could see this going to trial in the US.
Based on the limited information in the articles it’s hard to tell how reasonable the justification for use of deadly force was. He engaged the side of a vehicle, that he was worried about running him over, after taking the gun out while concerned about a crime that by itself didn’t justify use of deadly force. Without digging way down into the details of actual statements made in the immediate aftermath I could easily see a prosecution decision going both ways. We certainly don’t have enough in the two links to completely erase the possibility the firing was unreasonable, in my mind.
And they have plenty of old men with great experience with guns since long before they transferred the rifles from the SS Fanny into the SS Mountjoy II which landed at Larne.
If you have a firearm in the UK you are quite able to kill someone and not be convicted. There is a test of proportional force and reasonableness but certainly if, say, someone came at you with knife and you shot and killed them I can’t imagine any great outcry nor any real risk of jail time. Where the gun owner may be in bigger trouble is if the gun is unregistered or improperly stored.
But seeing as these cases are vanishingly rare ( homicide by gun in the UK overall is only in the low tens each year) they make big noises and each case can be picked over and endlessly debated but I’m hard pushed to recall a case where I’ve thought a reasonable killing was punished by an unfair jail sentence.
Lamping foxes (and rabbits) is legal (though no other types of game can be taken). Though most people would use night-vision or heat-indicating devices these days.
The supposed burglar and his sidekick have a long history of convictions for burglary and theft.