Militarization of the police is just symptom. Root cause is that police needs to expect that almost anyone in the US could be armed. This is not the case elsewhere.

If we are going for root causes, aren't there assault rifles in most Swiss homes, for instance? And yet...

In Switzerland the guns are typically locked away and out of reach.

While guns may exist in a house, for police it's unlikely to be confronted with it.

It's unlikely police get confronted with guns in the US too; we just have 350 million people, extremely authoritarian police culture, and a corporate news that jumps on the chance to report every instance.

I would wager way more citizens are killed by police (rightfully or not) than police are killed by citizens.

This was true long before police was militarized.

Militarization of police was indeed a symptom, but rather a symptom of the War on Drugs - the first SWAT team (in LA) was organized largely for that purpose.

Estimates are that there’s a firearm in 23-33% of Canadian households, while estimates for the US are around 44%.

I don’t disagree that the firearms are a problem, or even a factor, but it certainly doesn’t seem likely that it’s the root cause unless there’s some tipping point between 1-1.5/5 houses and 2/5 houses that makes things substantially more dangerous.

And it's utterly useless.. What good does a tank against a drone with an rpg7 head. Real resistence by a gang would obliberate a Swatteam. A cold War style armament spiral between gangs and police can not end in success.

But it can end in a kind of success for the arms manufacturers, their shareholders, the “hard on crime” politicians, the upper management of the police force, and the pro-police state people who gets validation for their calls ever-increasing need for violence.

Like developer with new shiny JavaScript framework/toolkit. Gotta use it at the next opportunity. Human condition to want to use the gear you're excited about. I'm glad my work is crappy rather than dangerous.