Other groups of protesters in Minnesota have begun bringing long guns to the protests. Notice that the hysteria is quite absent from these scenes: guns clarify the seriousness of the situation. There's no room for playing around. You're too close to the fire.
It's kind of an inversion of these few lines from Orthodoxy:
We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.
All that wild misbehavior comes from a lack of fear of consequences. Their faces are covered; the governor is on their side; and no one at all is armed, least of all the victims. All those things are walls protecting them from the fall. Remove the walls, and the song shall cease.
Meanwhile, a commenter here notes the irony of a forthcoming arrest on MLK Day. That too is an interesting juxtaposition: his protests were both peaceful and polite, at least on the side of the protesting group. Likewise, Dr. King's protests were more effective.
In any case, that group of protesters is not likely to evade consequences. I certainly wouldn't want to have drawn the personal attention of Harmeet Dhillon as a prosecuting attorney. "Everyone in the protest community needs to know that the fullest force of the federal government is going to come down and prevent this from happening and put people away for a long time," she said. From what I have known of her, I expect she means it.
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