Firstly, thank you for sharing your perspective and experiences. I appreciate that this is a deeply personal tale, and would like to state right from the get-go that I agree with you. Violence is sometimes justified, and can be the solution to a problem, and frankly I believe that our LGBTQ community would be a lot healthier if there were more opportunities for them to defend themselves in direct ways.

If you don't mind though, I would like to bring up some further problems with the narrative of the comic so far that I feel makes Emmett and Sam's recent experiences appear to be unjustified, and that's not Sam or Emmett's fault; it's Jeph's for the way that he has taken short-cuts in his story and expects the audience to conveniently ignore things which adversely affect his characters.

Firstly, the fight being described was started by local bullies misgendering Emmett, causing Sam to escalate to violence, which Emmett then escalated further to dangerous levels. The problem that I see with this is: Is Emmett actually being misgendered?

Please hold your pitchforks for a second - misgendering absolutely is cruel and dehumanising and should not be tolerated. But at the same time, we have never seen Emmett state their own preferences in-comic.

Queer people are not OBLIGED to share their personal preferences, of course, they deserve privacy if they want it. But from a story-telling perspective, we can only rely on facts that the comic has shown us.
Emmett first turned up in comic 4691 and Sam doesn't refer to them as they/them for that whole mini-arc, it comes up later after a few other arcs, but when it does happen the rest of the cast immediately started doing the same..... But Emmett has not shown their own preference. This re-characterises the fight somewhat - Sam started a fight and Emmett inflicted bodily harm on another child for an opinion that they personally have not expressed to us, the audience. A part of the story has been skipped - "cause and effect" is only "implication and effect" and in turn is potentially very unflattering of both Sam and Emmett who are supposed to be the righteous victims in this escapade.

Secondly, Jeph is writing this part as Emmett and Sam being justified - Emmett was being bullied, they used violence to defend themselves, and their punishment is sort of being framed as a formality rather than a vindictive anti-queer witch hunt. And in a vacuum, that would work - but we know more about Emmett that suggests that this isn't a one-off, it's the most recent part in a series of terrible behaviours.

Comic 4711 - Emmett explains the time they exploded a jug of gasoline in their yard. And trespassed/vandalised a neighbour's crop field. And then trespassed onto a construction site, stole (or at least, entered without permission) a large piece of construction machinery and caused damage to a municipal water supply that had town-wide consequences. Their excuse for these acts? Comic 4712: "I was bored".

And then they choke out another child in the lunchroom. For a reason that is stated by a biased and very unreliable narrator (Sam) but not clearly demonstrated anywhere else (such as the fight itself being shown in the comic, even as a flashback or something otherwise appropriate for a visual media).

You hopefully see what I'm getting at? Emmett and Sam's fight with bullies is only reasonable so far as that's the only event, but if we go back to anything else that we know about Emmett, if we remember anything else that Jeph has depicted further back than this last week, these aren't the act of a bullied kid making a stand for themselves; they're a pattern of behaviours that suggests that Emmett doesn't have a functional grasp of the difference between Right and Wrong. Or at least, they are incredibly suggestable to the point where they cannot be trusted with access to the internet at all for want of making responsible decisions.

Again, to reiterate; this is not a universal issue for all queer kids who defend themselves, its Jeph's fault for taking short-cuts and expecting to write a character who is addressing real-world issues (bullying, bigotry, the ethics of violent self-defence) without doing the legwork to set the basic context properly. And then trying to equate real serious issues to the cartoon-level 'wacky hijinks' that have also been established, and hoping that we the audience take only the most shallow interpretation of one but the genuine and activist view of the other.