Without going into geopolitics or minimizing any deserved outrage over it and response to it, there's a reasonable case of thinking this in terms of consequences of concentrating power. Specifically, consider thinking of this in terms of accidental discharge rates.
You arm one person in a room and tell them not to shoot, and it's almost a guarantee they won't. Try this with 10 people and it's still extremely likely they won't. With 100 it's still a good chance nothing will happen. At 1,000 I'd get nervous. But keep concentrating this force over time and a shooting becomes a guarantee. Arm 31,000 police officers and wait a year and you'll see either 23 revolvers or 434 semiautomatics go off accidentally. These are all seasoned professionals and it still happens to them as a matter of statistical certainty.
So back to the incident - you can get lost in tracing something like this to the trigger man, and their immediate firepower locality but the larger perspective is that risk and danger is directly tied to policy decisions that created these conditions. Training, aptitude and fire discipline is all over the charts in any military force and if history tells us anything, it's not a stretch to call it an accident.
You arm one person in a room and tell them not to shoot, and it's almost a guarantee they won't. Try this with 10 people and it's still extremely likely they won't. With 100 it's still a good chance nothing will happen. At 1,000 I'd get nervous. But keep concentrating this force over time and a shooting becomes a guarantee. Arm 31,000 police officers and wait a year and you'll see either 23 revolvers or 434 semiautomatics go off accidentally. These are all seasoned professionals and it still happens to them as a matter of statistical certainty.
So back to the incident - you can get lost in tracing something like this to the trigger man, and their immediate firepower locality but the larger perspective is that risk and danger is directly tied to policy decisions that created these conditions. Training, aptitude and fire discipline is all over the charts in any military force and if history tells us anything, it's not a stretch to call it an accident.
NYPD handgun study including accidental discharges [PDF]: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/145560NCJRS.pdf