The overlap between armed and police resistance is still small, but I hope it grows: not so that people can shoot at the police, but that so the balance of power shifts in a larger fashion and the police no longer feel safe in blatantly assaulting people, much the same way non-police feel now about attacking police with sticks and tear gas and “less lethal” projectiles.
They don’t do it because they know their counterparty can and will immediately escalate to potentially lethal force.
Counterintuitively, more arms results in more peace. The violence that is happening now results from the massive available-force imbalance. The police feel safe assaulting and murdering anyone they want, the only recourse against them being neutered by widespread co-conspirator testilying by LEOs.
The average person will need to stop trusting unsubstantiated cop testimony (feds included) before the systemic racism starts to decline.
I imagine that by the end of the year we will see lots of non-gun-owners beginning to question why all of the draconian restrictions on firearms ownership apply only to civilians and not the police.
Good police or bad police (and we know it’s the latter), that is a huge power imbalance ripe for abuse.
> The police so far haven't openly fired at crowds.
They have, however, been actively attacking, beating, arresting, and sometimes murdering people protesting peacefully.
I believe that the likelihood of all police abuses against large groups, from rubber bullets (that have fractured childrens' skulls in the last week) all the way up to the situation you describe, is significantly reduced in likelihood if they are made to fear immediate retaliation by the crowd, much the same way the crowd does not attack the police.
The police are humans too (it is claimed), so I would imagine they too, like the protestors, wish to go home at the end of their shift.
Look at it this way: every single cop in these things is armed with deadly force. There are already thousands of guns at these things, and we already know the police are violent, murderous liars, as evidenced by the thousands of cases of beatings, murders, injuries, and riots they've directly perpetrated in the last week.
The situation will not be worsened by reducing the power imbalance. If the murderous pigs can avoid shooting into crowds, I imagine the peaceful protestors will do at least as well.