Willingly and with aforethought engineering a situation that is practically guaranteed provoke an asleep person with ~no notice in the early morning to "unprovoked" defend themselves and wife against unknown people breaking into their home in order to lawfully "defend" one's self is execution in my book.

I can understand if there's some imminent threat but there was none. He was going to wake up, and report to a secure airport full of cops and federal agents. But they couldn't resist engineering a situation that ended up with him dead, doing what anyone would do to protect their wife when given ~zero time to distinguish threats entering their home at night.

Now you can argue maybe it wasn't an execution, and only their acts were indistinguishable from what those doing an execution would do.

If you violently bust into someone's home in the United States, you're liable to, and absolutely deserve to, get shot. I do not care if you have a badge. If you want to execute a lawful search warrant, the best time to do it is when nobodies home. The second best time is during the day, when you can clearly state your legal mandate to be there, and allow the homeowner to comply.

The ATF in this instance (and frankly most instances) chose the most violent option available to them, because good people don't join the ATF. Violent thugs who get off on shooting dogs join the ATF. And when they get tired of shooting dogs, they decide to manufacture a scenario where they get to kill a more dangerous game.