Stealing is heinous. I know your liberal sensibilities handicap you from seeing this truth, but in fact, this is the "reasonable" position. In the case of the (allegedly) false narrative that dashing to dodge a tab was the cause of this, it would have been closer to equal in heinousness by the virtue that it was what caused the overreaction.
Similar to how in the Street Coliseum we've seen a guy thrashed who smacked another man's wife/gf's ass. A smack on the ass is sexual assault, but if we were being "reasonable" like you, we'd say, meh, in the grand scheme of sexual assault, it's not that serious, and there certainly was no threat to the wife's safety. Meanwhile, the husband who commits a GBI in response, a gross bodily injury, from a sustained assault and battery, might be the one guilty of a "heinous" act.
Thankfully, in reality, most of the "reasonable" people I know hold my values, and appreciate the husband is justified to starch the living fuck out of someone who thinks he can just wander up and get handsy with his wife, because even if we acknowledge one might go too far, and both parties ultimately end up in the wrong, in that context, there were no problems until the first man caused a problem, so the flow of the events influences how we perceive the degree of moral trespass.
