Because indulging such impulses is a good way to get them to proliferate. I see your approach is to treat them as matters of fact and try to redirect them towards some less-lethal-than-guns solution for mutual benefit, but this is just going to give you more of what you don't want.

Right now a police officer in my area is typically equipped with:

baton; taser; pepper spray; knife; handgun

shotgun (in the car); flashlights (high powered, doubles as a club in a pinch)

5 weapons, with others in reserve, is already a lot to carry. Indeed, it's partly because of this proliferation of weapons (and all the training and liability issues that go with them) that many police are under-trained in physical combat (this from undercover and head-of-training officers I've known, whose opinion I'm inclined to take at face value).

So you've got heavily armed individuals who are trained/socialized to maintain a somewhat irrationally elevated perception of danger and most of their training if focused on using weapons to induce coercion. This is a bad combination. not just for the job and the public, but for the police themselves. I know a former police officer who doesn't keep any weapons in the house, but who's also paranoid about crime because he's been rtained to think about all the bad things that could happen to the point that he's afraid to hire someone to clean his house because they might case it on behalf of burglars or home invaders. This despite the fact that he doesn't own anything especially valuable; he lives in an ordinary suburban home and probably has less stuff than most people.

I also didn't mean to suggest anything about increasing the total amount of equipment carried by an officer. Are you suggesting that proliferation of a greater total number of weapons is a likely practical outcome? Variety coincides with proliferation, or something to that effect?

In most (northern) European countries the response to somebody brandishing a knife would be to set up a perimeter around that person, rather than directly engage them. Only as a last resort would you resort to violence. Instead you try to tire them out.

By comparison, the American police response would be to immediately subdue the person with any force necessary.

It's not just lethality, but it's also not just the way police respond, because it's not one or the the other. If you don't agree that the lethality of the weapon is a significant input to whether or not a dangerous outcome is more likely, we can't have a serious conversation.

Of course the weapon in question is also a variable, but I by far the biggest variable is police behavior in the US, where it seems every situation calls for force escalation and solving the matter at hand with a full-on assault of some sort.

I think you're right that escalating behavior is a significant variable. But I think that's a very tough thing to change. It may be that the low hanging fruit consists in changing the equipment rather than the culture. But I don't disagree with you in the big picture.

Anyway, I'll be careful not to assume your comments are attempting to be responsive to the things they reply to when I see them in the future, to prevent my misunderstanding.

You're leaving witnesses and complicating any potential legal cases in the aftermath.