Some people will say "but it's just money; nobody should die over it." Possibly. I gotta ask...what is money?
Money is a medium representing and facilitating a barter of goods and services. Most money recently represents services. Services are what a person spent a portion of his/her life doing; i.e., money paid for services represents an exchange of a fraction of someone's life for other goods/services.
Let's say I make $20/hour. I give up an hour of my life for, say, a nice dinner out (tack on another hour traded for m'lady's half of the dinner).
On the way to dinner and fiddling with my cash for some trivial & reasonable reason, some perp snatches $20 from me - he has stolen an hour of my life, an hour I gave up for...his next crack hit.
Ticked, out $20 (an hour) of adequate dinner money and still hungry, I find an ATM and withdraw $320, figuring I need money for the next week anyway. Distracted by the previous theft, I fail to notice the incoming thug who whacks me upside the head and takes my just-withdrawn wad. $320/($20/hr)+(8 hrs daily sleep) = a full day of my life stolen.
Sore, pissed and late for my date, I go back to my car so I can get m'lady and pay for dinner with plastic. No car. $**^% car is gone. It was right...there. Gone in 60 seconds. My just-purchased-for-twenty-grand slightly-used loaded '98 Mustang is so much air. $20,000 - poof. $20,000/($20/hr)+(n days * 8 hrs sleep) = 2 1/4 months of my life given up. A fifth of a year of my life spent banging my head against buggy beta-level programming tools in exchange for...raw materials in a chop shop.
See where this is going?
Let's consider the armored car in the original article. The perps, dreaming of a million-dollar Brinks heist (servicing CostCo? never said perps were smart), figure out the routine and show up to knock over the truck. Let's say they're luck and the truck does contain $1,000,000. Most of that money is there because of people exchanging their time for small green pieces of paper, at an average of $20/hr. That megabuck truck contains the representation of 8.5 straight years (including sleep) of human life.
$1,000,000 = 8.5 years. If I'm 70 years old, and on average have 8.5 years to go, and some thug decides to take my life before my proper time, I've got every right to stop him by any means. Similarly, so does the Brinks guard when some perp decides to take the exchanged-for-greenbacks 8.5 years of people's lives.
Just a thought.
Art Eatman summed up the above blather very nicely:
"I spent part of my life acquiring that (money; property). Nobody has the
right to say that my life is worthless or meaningless, or to steal part
of that life."
Carl Donath 8/19/00