alt Hacker NewsLegally speaking, is murder stealing?
(And yes, "legally" matters, because we're talking about laws in this thread, not colloquial "their life was stolen" type expressions.)
This question is obviously (hopefully) rhetorical, no need to answer. My point is that different crimes are different. Otherwise literally every crime is stealing, and no other words for different crimes matter. Obviously different crimes are different.
IAAL but this is not legal advice.
In most U.S. states, the actual crime will be a specific reference to a section in a Penal Code (or, for Federal crimes, the U.S. Code). For civil actions, it's likely to be a reference to a common-law tort, or some Federal statute providing a private right of civil action.
In the case of taking a physical object from someone else, most states call it "theft" in the penal code, or "conversion" for the common-law tort.
But all of this is academic anyway. I'm not entirely sure what your point is.