&gt; Alleged criminals.<p><i>Not even alleged</i> criminals; the right to self-defense usually requires that the threat comes from someone without a legal privilege for the act, but the requirements for actual criminality (particular <i>mens rea</i>) are not necessarily required to trigger the right to use force in self-defense, even lethal force.<p>And this makes sense: the right to self-defense is not about the criminal culpability of the one against whom violence is permitted, its about a limit on the criminal culpability of the user of violence.<p>Now, one can argue that in some jurisdictions the <i>details</i> of the rules on self-defense are drawn overly broadly, or that they are applied selectively and in a discriminatory manner. But I don&#x27;t think the general principal that people will not be held criminally accountable for use of force reasonably scaled to deal with an imminent threat which had no legal privilege to be made, independently of whether the one making the threat met the legal standards for criminal culpability in so doing, should be even slightly controversial.