The police already have guns, lots of them.

The problem with less lethal crowd control tools is that police use them in situations where they would never use a real firearm, creating injuries that wouldn’t happen otherwise. This is really problematic when the police are angry at the protestors, as it gives them a way to inflict revenge pain without the PR fallout of opening fire with rifles.

There is evidence that even on a regular basis, tasers have not replaced firearms, but instead have replaced other means of de-escalation and constraint. The result is that more americans might be dead because we’ve handed out tasers to cops without a second thought.