The problem is that this whole scenario is that it's based in knee-jerk idiocy, and cowboy movie fantasies, instead of facts, and reality.
Not true. The whole street was a private street they were on Portland Place is a private stree
see quote below.
The moment you point a gun at a crowd, ANYONE in that crowd with a weapon has the right, and even an obligation, to shoot you dead, immediately. Because you are posing an open, obvious, and deadly threat to everyone in that crowd. And anyone in that crowd that can respond to that threat, should. This is why anyone with a brain in their head knows that you NEVER point a gun at someone thinking that they will capitulate to your threat. If there were a cop in that crowd, he or she would shoot you dead. Because in real life, when you pose a deadly threat to a cop, or to any other human being, for ANY REASON, they will kill you before you kill them, if they can. They are not going to talk it over, or capitulate. They are simply going to shoot first, if they are able, to stop you from shooting them.
For this reason, if for no others, it was patently moronic of these two home-owners to go out and point their guns at a crowd, no matter what they thought that crowd was intent on doing. And they are very lucky that they were not both shot dead, immediately, by some heroic armed citizen within that crowd. Because he/she would have been completely within their rights to do so.
Secondly, the idea that human lives are not as valuable as the property one thinks he owns, is pathetically irrational. Ownership is a social pact. It only exists as a functional ideal so long as the humans we live with and among agree to honor it as such. If they have not agreed, and we insist on their capitulation, then WE become the aggressor: the 'enemy' of the people, not them. And they have the right (as well as the superior ability) to treat us as such.
Everything we have in life, no matter how much or how little, we have because we are a member of a cooperative society of human beings. Our well-being depends on theirs, and theirs on ours. Understanding this, we mutually agree to abide by the laws that order and control our interactions. Because without that mutual agreement, there is no society. There is no cooperation. There is only endless strife, and competition, and struggle, and suffering, and violence, and death. There is no point in our existing at all, if this is the path we are going to choose as extant beings.
Which is why both under the law, and under the rule of ethical reason, we do not have the right to end a human life for the sake of some inanimate object. No matter how much money it's worth, or how much we may 'love it'.