User blog comment:Wass12/Translatation Help 7 (and a weird phenomenon)/@comment-1330314-20111129192719

"I choked" here means he hesitated and couldn't bring himself to shoot him.

If you want a synonym, you could use "real as the weather" and afterwards say "there's a storm in Rapture".

The last metaphor connects human life to cloth/meat/any modifiable product: the tradesman weighs and measures their product while the judge weighs and measures a defendant's innocence, and the latter cuts the thread of human life (i.e. execution) as the former cuts a sheet/slice/etc.