Absolutely agree. I've taken and helped run many, many courses on civilian self-defense, concealed weapon licensing, etc. And questions about carrying asp batons, or using bean bag rounds in a shotgun often come up. The prevailing wisdom is that civilians have no business using these things. Pepper spray seems to be an exception.

But the thinking is that if you use things against someone using deadly force on you, that's a bad strategy and you might die. If you use these things against someone not using deadly force on you, you're escalating, risking their life, and you're risking assault charges yourself. You need to be completely peaceful, de-escalate (and in some states, retreat), and then when it's time to use force, you make it deadly.

Now police officers are in a different situation but I think the continuum of force here needs to be at least a little more similar than it is. The way they're reacting to these protests is like they're trying to illustrate the protester's point for them. And one may say they're reacting to the riots and the looting, but for the most part they're not immediately present for all that anyway. There is no reason (except to simply submit a general population into not resisting them overall - and honestly that's exactly what they're doing) for you to be using "less-lethal" projectiles out of a firearm against crowds of unarmed people.