@MonkeyHead:
Wow....I...that's just difficult for me to process. If I came home and found somebody holding my wife and kids at knifepoint, brain damage would be the LEAST of his worries by the time I was through. I'm going to attack him, I'm going to chase him, and I'm most likely going to kill him if I have the opportunity, or at the very least beat him so thoroughly that he will never do that again to anybody.
Maybe it's partly my personality, maybe it's the deeply-embedded American value of "righteous violence" (which I would argue is one of the reasons we have a more violent society)....but in my mind, when you threaten my loved ones (far moreso than my property) with bodily injury, death, rape, etc. you have just forfeited your right to exist as far as I'm concerned. I'm a generally mellow, conflict-averse kind of guy, but that's one area where I have a berserk button. My wife is the same way. Hell, my wife is terrified of firearms, but if somebody came in and pointed a gun at our kids, she'd be likely to rip their throat out barehanded. The maternal/paternal instinct can be a very powerful thing.
To elaborate on the culture of "righteous violence", there's a long-standing meme in American culture that the bad guys deserve to die by virtue of being "bad". This is why the white-hat cowboy lawman doesn't have to arrest the black-hat cowboy. He has to *try*, but in the end the black-hat typically tries to pull his gun on him after faking surrender, and then gets cut down in a hail of lead. Nobody sheds a tear for the black-hat. And most Westerns ended that way because it appeals to an American sense of justice that is more about who's left standing than courtrooms. Americans have never quite fully been satisfied with courts of law as the final arbiter of justice. We much prefer the self-empowered form of 'frontier justice', wherein the hero is judge, jury and executioner. And the villains are unmistakably, umambiguously deserving of their fate.