Those are individuals who should be tried independently of Jones. By that standard, anybody who goes and commits a crime because of song lyrics should find the artist tried as an accomplice.
It's not "walking on eggshells," it's a matter of legal accuracy. You may not like it, but it's important for maintaining a fair courts system (without which, we forfeit a civil society and revert to tribalism).
So far no part of the argument you've presented has had anything to do with US defamation law, just for what it's worth. If you're trying to be persuasive, that might be the part of your argument you should opt to shore up. In the alternative, you could adopt the somewhat more popular strategy of "the entire edifice of US defamation law is incongruous with the Constitution and should be thrown out". That argument is wrong too, but it'll get you farther.
later edit; I wrote the following I think as the reply below was being written
If you watched the Texas Jones trial, you saw the jury be instructed in some detail on what forms of damage they could and could not attribute to Jones. But you can also just look this up; there's no shortage of documents on the Internet that lay out the procedure for attributing damages to a proven case of defamation.
Long story short: if you damage somebody's reputation with false statements and, following causally from that damage, they suffer losses because lunatics start harassing them on the street, you are in fact liable for those losses.
We were editing at the same time. When I finished editing my comment, I noticed you'd replied, and so I went back and noted that, so it wouldn't look like you'd ignored the last two paragraphs of my comment in your response.
There’s criteria for defamation. Jones likely met them, but it didn’t matter here because he lost by default in the trial due to his overwhelming failure to engage with the legal system in his own defense.
If an artist published songs with lyrics that met the criteria for defamation, and then people heard the song and committed crimes, the artist would be liable for defamation and the listeners who committed crimes would be guilty of those crimes (notably, defamation is civil, not criminal).
Those are individuals who should be tried independently of Jones. By that standard, anybody who goes and commits a crime because of song lyrics should find the artist tried as an accomplice.
It's not "walking on eggshells," it's a matter of legal accuracy. You may not like it, but it's important for maintaining a fair courts system (without which, we forfeit a civil society and revert to tribalism).