Yeah, lethality is irrelevant since, well, they're not lethal. Period. Not to mention in both films, the criminals are only actually stopped by violence from another adult. For all the traps, the Wet Bandits were stopped by a grown man whacking them on the head with a shovel, and that is portrayed as being 100% morally right.
That said, I think the trope is somewhat implicitly in effect because as the Cracked article points out, if an adult set said traps, they would be a paranoid wackadoo at best, and Saw-esque sadist at worst.
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Well, it's hard to call it paranoia when Kevin set these traps because he KNEW that the bandits are planning to rob him. There is also a fact that Kevin is physically weaker than those two, meaning he had to stop them by using his brain. If we were to perfectly emulate the situation we'd need a short, nerdy guy in a glasses going against two guys around the size of a young gorillas, when he knows they're planning to rob him. And like the original entry pointed out, Kevin didn't force these bandits into his home, they continued in even after they knew the house was booby-trapped.
Except it's his first line of defense. Let me put it this way. A guy knows a robbery is going to occur. He knows when, and he knows where. If his first instinct is "inflict severe bodily harm on the robbers" versus "call the police," we would think something is implicitly wrong with him. Hell, even the Deathwish movies establish the police as ineffectual when the main character takes justice into his own hands and even that (well, the first one was critical of him for doing so.
That's what I think is so weird. The plan isn't to defend himself. The plan is to hurt the robbers... and then call the cops.
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If I remember correctly Kevin didn't want to get involved with the police because he earlier accidentally shoplifted a toothbrush. A childish reason, but a reason nevertheless. While you could say that the reason he dealt with the robbers in this way was that he's a child, the moral justification here is not "It's okay to harm an adult when you're a child" but "It's okay to harm a bad guy to stop him from badguying". You said yourself that the Old Man gets the same justification, therefore no double standard is in play here. We can speculate what would happen if Kevin was older, but that's just a speculation and Examples Are Not Arguable.
Agreed. what Kevin was doing to those crooks was self defense. If those crooks weren't trying to actively harm Kevin, then this would be an example.
I don't think it's an example. While I agree that Those Two Bad Guys having their S handed to them is funnier when they're beaten by a kid, but Kevin has a moral high ground from a simple fact that these guys are actively trying to rob his house, and if I remember correctly they would they would've had no qualms about killing him. I don't see the fact that traps would be lethal if used in real life as relevant, since as far as the movie universe goes they aren't. This is roughly equivalent to saying that someone is a Designated Hero because of liberal use of the Set Swords to "Stun" trope. If someone had beaten the living crap out two robbers coming to his home who may or may not be armed would it be okay, regardless of whether the guy is a kid or an adult?
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