I agree with the sentiment, but nobody is talking about organizing life around not risking death, we are talking about whether to go out of our way to confront people we assume are criminals.
"Criminal" doesn't mean much these days. You're probably a criminal yourself if you've driven a car in the US or if you lived in the US after 1980 between the ages of 18 and 21. (I don't remember if Canadian law is as absurd.) The question is whether a petty thief is gonna cap you because you caught him stealing your laptop, and the answer is that it's very unlikely. The statistics khafra posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2743973 suggest that, on average, you'd have to confront thieves between hundreds of times and tens of thousands of times before getting killed.
