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.
That's controversial at best. Arguably, part of the reason the police is so aggressive and distrustful when interacting with regular people is the higher gun density in the country.
I mean, maybe if you chart violence (y axis) vs percentage of gun ownership (x axis), you get a bell curve and the US is in an awkward middle position. But that's a maybe, and, anyway, that means that both increasing and decreasing the number of weapons would reduce violence in that case.
The vast majority of police violence we witness in the US is against totally unarmed people. I think this gives the police far too much credit. Being a police officer is actually a very safe job to begin with, and violent crime in the US has been decreasing steadily for decades.
In fact, most of the worst offending police departments are the places in the US where the incidence of civilian gun ownership, legal or otherwise, is lowest: New York, Boston, Chicago, LA.
The cops simply don't need an excuse for violence, they're violent even, or perhaps because, the public they attack are unarmed.
The Black Panthers had it right.
> 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.