Do you have a choice? Either water down the second amendment and disarm the population or give the police what they need. I am not taking a side, simply stating the dilemna of law enforcement.
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...
I have yet to see any statistics showing that militarizing the police makes them any more effective or safe.
The police need to be trained in how to de-escalate; they need to be trained not to "dominate" every situation they're involved in. The need to be demilitarized, and SWAT units need to be expanded slightly to deal with the small number of cases every year that demand real firepower.