Depending on which version of the movie you saw, Jack didn't kill Anton (the owner of the club). There's a deleted scene that takes place right after John and Jack find the car full of guns where John goes over to a Cadillac in the parking lot and checks it out. Anton comes out of the club with two thugs and his arm in a sling. John asks Jack if he knows him and he says something like, "I shot this guy once." John and Jack end up in a brawl with the two guys and Anton runs off. The scene ends with the two driving the car away towards Chernobyl just like in the final cut.
The extended cut, however, was a direct headshot. Anton is definitively dead in that version. Why would the audience be okay with it? Because it can be assumed that he's a bad guy. Jack is a protagonist. The audience will likely assume that Anton is not just some random guy in a club who Jack decides to casually murder. We can surmise he is killed for a good reason or is someone deserving of it.
And the guys at the safe house that John shoots weren't exactly coming over to ask for a cup of sugar. Jack's partner just got it in the head, Yuri caught one in the arm, and you can hear them using charges to breach the walls. Why wouldn't John shoot them? It wasn't murder. It was self-defense.
Yes, I can understand the criticisms about the car chase. Again, this is a movie we're talking about here. John is a protagonist. It can be assumed, going by movie logic, that John and Jack killed absolutely no one in the car chase. Why? Because they're the good guys. The same way no civilians were seriously injured by John dropping the C4 down the elevator shaft in Die Hard 1 and blew out several floors of windows, or how no one was seriously hurt when he drove a cab through Central Park and into traffic, or how no civilians were killed when John tossed the bomb out of the back of the subway car and derailed the train, or how all the cars in the street were abandoned in Die Hard 4 when he took on that fighter jet in the truck.
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