It's interesting too in that I think everybody can see that violence inherently breeds violence, yet many remain blind to the fact that intolerance too breeds intolerance. We have two ends of political extremism today. The many things they have in common include the fact that they both are completely intolerant of the other side as they consider the other side completely intolerant. And as the mutual extremism grows, so too does the self righteous intolerance. That's going to end well...

On the contrary, we created an official group tasked with dealing out violence (the police) because it's generally accepted (whether it's true or not) that some violence must be met with violence.

And that blurring supports the point. As police face more regular violence, they themselves tend to become more violent, leading to even more violence against them, and vice versa. In countries where the police face no violence, they often are not even armed. Take for instance Iceland which may have an even greater percent of their population armed than the US (our per capita ownership rate is so high because many gun owners own many guns) - yet their police are unarmed. 2013 was a sad year for Iceland. It was the first year that their police fired a gun at a civilian, ever [1].

It always leads to sort of 'which came first the chicken or the egg' type question, but the point is absolutely clear that intolerance breeds intolerance in much the same way that violence breeds violence. And it's quite sad watching people fall into this. People don't seem to understand that nearly all the evil in this world is and has been done by people who felt they were the 'good guys.' "No no, it's different this time. We really are the good guys! History will prove us right!" Said everybody, ever.

[1] - https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2013/1203/Lots-of-gun...

Considerations about the aggressiveness of the US police force specifically are certainly an important topic, but wholly irrelevant here. I'm not from the US, nor was their brand of policing on my mind when commented.

We could discuss the ethics of imprisonment, and I expect we'd agree. But you certainly can't claim that police's task is to deal out violence - particularly preemptive.