Premeditation

So it's still self defense in cases of spousal abuse, even if it's blatantly planned, premeditated homicide?

OK.

So why not in cases of bullying?

Bullying can be pretty extreme, physically, and it's sheer hell, psychologically.

Bullies don't stop and adults don't help, often effectively joining the bullies, taking their side by blaming or scorning and refusing help to their victims.

If you can't accept that schoolyard bullying should end in murder then stop the bullying.

Reading Echo Burning by Lee Child.

Let me know when there's a single novel that handles the desperate violence of bullying victims as sympathetically as this and many others handle that of battered wives.

In his Enneads, somewhere, Plotinus, writing of Providence, saves the honor of the gods by saying bullying victims deserve to be bullied, though no bully or abusive husband ever picked a victim with the least chance of beating the shit out of him in a "fair fight."

A "fair fight."

That's when the heavyweight champ pounds a seventeen year old nerd into a small puddle of blood, isn't it?

Anyway, that the victim of bullying deserves his fate is a not at all uncommon view in Western, or other, history.

By the way, Lee Child has a Mexican wetback quote Balzac and Jack Reacher, his stone cold killer and peerless thug hero, quotes Marcuse.

Not sure Tom Cruise got any of that.