...we have no way of knowing for sure whether, at the time of the shooting, the Muhs really believed that they were legally defending their property, but that seems to be their defense.
It doesn't matter what they thought. The law is clear and their actions are clearly outside of what it allows. Your continued attempt to argue your point of view based on the action of the Muhs makes it clear that you're not getting it.
The Muh's broke the law and murdered someone in the process. That is not evidence of a problem with TX law, it's evidence that the Muh's are ignorant of the law. You don't fix ignorance of the law by changing the law.
However, if the law restricted the use of deadly force to defending one's person (or someone else's), there would be no room for any confusion as to whether they could reasonably have thought they were justified in shooting at a fleeing vehicle.
The current law leaves no room for confusion. They were clearly in the wrong. The issue is not the law, it's their ignorance of it or their disregard for it.
I KNOW you've said that's not the problem (that you object primarily on the basis that you believe the law is unethical), but you keep bringing up the Muh's and their actions. You're either using them as a red herring or you were being disengenuous when you made your earlier statement that:
"you know that's not my reasoning. What I am questioning is the ethical basis of the law itself:" Either this is about the Muhs or it's not. If it is, my earlier statement stands. You don't restrict the rights of 24 million people because there are ignorant idiots/criminals in the world. If it's not then you can't keep bringing up what they did as evidence for your arguments.
...I fail to see how that's an oversimplification.
It's an oversimplification because the laws in question take up a page or more. Read in their entirety the laws are clearly not about "shooting people over minor property crimes" but rather have several common and common-sense themes that weave the laws together into a whole that actually is quite reasonable.
Trying to condense it into a single sentence is an obvious oversimplification and makes the laws appear to be much more simplistic than they really are.
Oh yes, I know it's an uphill battle...
Either you think that TX will be a better place when criminals can feel more secure about committing crimes in TX or you want TX to be a worse place than it is now.
I'm against both.
By the way, one of the main points of having individual states (instead of just one large country) is so that each individual state can enact it's own laws as its own citizens see fit. In other words, a person, who, like you, believes that the use of deadly force should be heavily restricted can happily find a home in a state like IL which has deadly force laws that match your ideals and leave others to enjoy life in states like TX which place a heavier emphasis on protecting the rights of the law-abiding than on protecting the rights of people caught in the act of committing crimes.
In other words, there is a place for people with views like yours. A place where you don't have to change any laws to be happy with what they say. TX is not that place.