I happen to agree with you. I was just speculating what could have been done.

I have had to make decisions under stress. If I had been in the captain’s chair, I absolutely would have fired.

A verified enemy plane diving towards my ship in an active war zone?

If I had been thinking at all, I’d be thinking about the British losing a ship in the Falklands just 6 years ago.

Probably I would as well.

Then again there is a reason I'm not a navy captain with copious amounts of missiles under my control.

If you are commander of an explicitly Anti-Air cruiser, and you are unaware that any F-14 tasked against you would not have an anti-ship missile and would be abusing some other weapon "off-label", then you should not be defending a carrier fleet from aircraft. You should be familiar with the airframes, weapons, and abilities of your adversary.

The F-14 is not an attack aircraft! It was designed to intercept incoming air threats and bombers!

"So... the fighter was in range of your missiles."

"Yep."

"And rapidly diving directly toward your fleet."

"Mmhmm."

"But you didn't fire on it? Why not?"

"Well, it was an F-14, you see. Doesn't possess anti-ship missiles."

"Yes... that's precisely the sort of tactical advantage you were put there to exploit."

"Wouldn't have been sporting."

Meanwhile in reality:

"So you got a radar track squaking civillian"

"Yup"

"And it never made any search or track radar emissions"

"Yup"

"And it was climbing out of the area, and despite all your instruments showing it continuing to climb, you all asserted it was diving for an attack run"

"Right"

"And instead of trying to further deconflict, or ask any of the other local navy vessels their interpretation, or just take a risk and accept that as a member of the military sometimes your job is to stand up in the line of fire, you decided that this was definitely an F-14 interceptor, being used to attack an AEGIS vessel whose intended design is to protect an american aircraft carrier from 20 simultaneous incoming Soviet antiship missiles, and was definitely a threat to said vessel"

"Yup"

"And now 290 innocent people are dead"

The captain of the Vincennes also claims they were in "hot pursuit" of a small Iranian gunboat in "self defense" at the time, and was noted by superiors as regularly going beyond his Rules of Engagement in training activities. He had a chip on his shoulder and clearly made up his mind about what he was going to do to that plane well before he had any indication it was a threat. A nearby vessel that was datalinked (ie, was hooked into the same battlefield map and signals) very quickly and clearly concluded it was a civilian flight. Capt Rogers convinced himself otherwise.

Not one iota of what you've written here is relevant to my point. Go back and re-read the conversation.

All I was saying was that the fact that an F-14 doesn't generally carry anti-ship missiles, is irrelevant to the mission of an anti-air cruiser.