Some facts, which may or may not be actual “facts,” but it’s a story.  (I saw it here, btw).

The set-up:

My friend was at a house with three other individuals. They were partying and apparently they had entered the house without the owner’s permission.

The owner showed up and told them to get out. My friend said they refused and they might have threatened the owner. But he didn’t say what exactly the threat was.

Then the owner went to a closet and got a gun and aimed it at them and forced them out at gunpoint. Was the owner right to do this, and was it legal?

Now, there are lots of details one misses here.  “They were partying and apparently they had entered the house without the owner’s permission”?  Really?  I’m not sure you can just slide over that with an “apparently.”  Were they friends of the owner?  Was even ONE of them a friend of the owner?  How did they gain entry to the house?

Anyway, the two questions at the end are the money part:  “Was the owner right to do this?” and then “Was it legal?”  I would separate the first one into two parts:  Did the owner have a right to do this, and was the owner morally justified to do this?  Those are related, but they are not identical.  I could imagine facts, and threats, that would have made the answers “yes,” but it’s not obvious.

As far as being “legal,” it might depend on what US state this was.  But if the gun is legally owned and registered, the answer is almost certainly “yes, it was legal.”

I’m going to fill this in a little.  Suppose that one of the guys was in fact a fairly well-known acquaintance of the owner, and the group gained entry without breaking in or climbing through an unlocked window.  Was the owner morally justified in picking up a gun?  More important, is there any possible circumstance that would give moral jjustification to the “visitors'” refusal to leave?

The way we normally handle stuff like this is manners.  Moral duties generally imply patterns of correct action that do not require either calling the police or resorting to threats of violence like picking up a gun.  Or am I over-estimating the role of manners here?  (Perhaps unsurprisingly, relatively few of the Quora commenters show anything like “manners”…)