My thoughts on looting during protests have evolved a bit over time. I understand that ultimately looting and violence do not help the cause. Indeed, many people use the looting and violence as an excuse to not support the movement, which is absurd.This is just a rationalization on their part. The vast majority of protesters are peaceful, the looting is most often done by opportunists taking advantage of the confusion created at protests, and the violence is almost always initiated by the police or right and left extremists taking advantage of the confusion. To this, add the fact that there is a large overlap in the group of people that oppose the Black Lives Matter protests and people who oppose further restrictions on gun access. So this overlapping group justifies opposing restrictions on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines on the grounds that the majority of gun owners who do not kill people should not punished because of the few who commit murder and mass murder. They use similar reasoning to oppose police reforms: you cannot punish all police because of “a few bad apples.” They then turn around and say BLM should not protest because of the small fraction of people that loot or perform acts of violence, even if most of those are not even BLM protesters. Despite the fact that, hopefully most would agree, taking lives is a more serious offense to humanity than damaging some property. This is a logical inconsistency. A harsher characterization would be hypocrisy. Harsher still, it is a callow evasion. In other words, the people using looting and violence as an excuse not to support the changes to our racist system demanded by the protesters are merely trying to shield themselves from criticism for beliefs they hold regardless of reality.
All that said, there likely are some protesters who, exhausted and fed up with innumerable aggressions over many years, have their anger spill over into undirected violence. To me, and hopefully to anyone who has ever lost their temper when tired and frustrated, such actions are at least understandable.
The Monopoly analogy in the video below is not all that new, but the passion with which it is presented is worth ingesting.