That doesn't mean that they can't do more de-escalation or take other steps, but the high prevalence of guns does seem like it would be a contributing factor.
(I realize this touches a hot topic (guns) but it's an honest question, and sympathetic to law enforcement.)
Despite the much higher relative levels, the amount of gun violence in the US still isn't all that high in an absolute sense, and police are not particularly the target of it.
It’s almost as if the American gun lobby wants both sides to need lots of guns and bullets for some reason...
Maybe it's to do with having guns?
As a born and raised American, I'm inclined to think not. I could be wrong of course, but everything that I've seen and experienced growing up and living in the US has led me to believe otherwise.
I want to think that more protestors being armed would make a difference, but ultimately I believe it will just lead to escalation and more deaths by cop (and/or the national guard, as we're finding out in Louisville currently).
(Don't get me wrong, what those protestors did was senseless and the epitome of entitlement.)
Switzerland (disclaimer; I'm Swiss) has also lots of weapons around, but if the police are ever shooting someone it's usually big news with investigations on whether it was really necessary.
From my laymen point of view, police training and holding them accountable to their actions is probably even a bigger factor than gun availability (although this is certainly a factor too). If I'm not mistaken, Swiss police training strongly encourages to back off if someone draws a weapon, trying to keep it cool, talk softly/slowly etc. It seems that in the US, the first hint of a weapon will result in drawn weapons by police and a 'drop your weapon'-shouting-contest; that's at least what seems to often happen in footage that ends up in the news where something goes wrong and someone ends up being dead.
Edit: One of the more memorable examples I saw was a video via NYT, where some guy was being arrested, tried to adjust his pants and was immediately being shot because the officer thought he was going for a gun. This is absolutely unimaginable in Switzerland; I would have to look it up for the facts but I think to remember a case where someone was shot holding (and threatening with) a fake-gun, and the officer who did so went to jail if I remember correctly.
There's precedent for this. In the 60s the black panthers open carried in California to protest, of course, police misconduct. Reagan signed in the Mulford Act [1], banning open carry in CA.
If BLM want stricter gun control laws (not sure if they do), all they need to do is arm themselves at protests.
Apparently they were let in, then arrested, then released without charge and their guns returned as they hadn't broken the law. However, they were there protesting against the 'Mulford Act' that intended to disarm them, and it was subsequently passed. So they didn't get shot, but they didn't get what they wanted either, and they did get banned from doing it again.
Of course, there's a lot more detail than I've put into this post, and society was pretty different at the time. Reagan supporting gun control? The NRA as a sporting organisation that supported gun control? And the panthers were Marxist? So I'm not sure it's a very instructive example about how the same thing would go today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party#Protest_at...
This is a highly misleading way of describing the situation.
The police set up a traffic stop to arrest them. They fled the stop. Finicum told the police he wasn't going to surrender and that they'd have to shoot him. He reached for his gun in his pocket, and then he was shot.
If black men were only being killed by police after fleeing arrest, refusing to surrender, challenging the police to shoot them, and then reaching for a gun...then we wouldn't have much of a police violence problem.