You wrote a crowd of evil persons [rioting] and threatening to kill perfectly innocent children.) so you cannot say you are not playing the 'think of the children' card. It really seems like you are just trying to take over control of the conversation and make it run in the direction of normalizing the use of force.

So unlike many (most?) HNers I have actual personal experience with it.

Why are you assuming HNers are not politically active? I've been tear gassed 6 times since last Friday and this is not my first rodeo. I have a bunch of use gas grenades sitting on my desk whose manufacturers I'm tracing right now.

Your military training experience is good as far as it goes, and I have heard similar stores from many police officers, but it seems to me you are overlooking many factors. You were selected for physical fitness and toughness before being admitted to military training and you knew that however unpleasant the experience that it was a controlled setting supervised by experienced people with full medical facilities and personnel available if anything went wrong.

Imagine yourself part of a small crowd of people of mixed experience, age, mobility, and physical health. Some are prepared with masks or respirators, eye protection, and full-body clothing, others are in casual wear like shorts and t-shirts. You and they are standing on the sidewalk around an intersection, occasionally someone shouts an opinion or a few people chant something but mostly people are quiet. Halfway down each block is a line of police in riot gear with gas masks. At an order from their sergeant a grenadier on one street fires two or three small CS gas grenades toward where the street meets the intersection. People run or walk briskly away from that line of police and around the corner. Most are OK although a few are not handling it well and need help breathing or rinsing their eyes. Next the police farther up that street fire a couple of grenades at the street, causing the crowd to change direction. Some run across the street, if they can. The police on the 3rd and 4th streets repeat the process and now about half the crowd is off the sidewalk and in the intersection. Police throw a larger combination CS gas grenade into the middle of the intersection which explodes with a 175 dB bang, a bright flash of light, and a much larger and thicker cloud of CS gas. While everyone is variously indisposed, the lines of police move from down each block right up to the intersection, penning the crowd in from all sides. Than a recorded message is played declaring an illegal assembly because so many people have departed the sidewalk.

The stated cause for this action was that some minutes earlier, when 2 streets were still open down to the next intersection, an unknown person drove up to and through the intersection, dinged another car, and down the street at a dangerous speed before making a sharp turn and driving away. It's unclear to me why this was considered the fault of the people standing on the sidewalk. This happened about 36 hours ago in the Bay Area. Here are two short videos captured early in the process.

https://twitter.com/LCRWnews/status/1266987708854923265

https://twitter.com/LCRWnews/status/1266988367905910784

You can always make up a scenario where a given approach or tool is the most economical and appropriate. It's a good diversion from the unpleasant facts of widespread inappropriate deployment that are happening now.