[tertiary]

> Either water down the second amendment ... or give the police what they need

That's a false dichotomy and misses the main point of the argument to reduce police militarization.

Nobody is upset when SWAT responds to a school shooting or a terrorist act. The problem (I suppose a really good problem to have after all) is that those things almost never happen, even though they are the ones we see on the news and can quickly retrieve in our minds. You're more likely to die in a plane crash than in a terrorist act in the US.

That begs the question: if militarized units don't have enough violent crime to respond to, but are still a full time unit then what do they respond to? The answer is why people are upset and it's because we are sending them to respond to drug offenses and to execute search warrants instead. Situations thay they inevitably end up escalating (on average) and killing people in.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...

[craftinator]

New Zealand just went through an interesting experiment; they armed some of their police as a trial run, then got feedback from the community that that armed unit served. The majority response was that while people understood WHY the police were armed, they didn't want armed police doing things like traffic stops, responding to domestic disputes, etc.., because their mere presence was threatening.