Spot and get them first.
Now you have gone from the legal but questionable use of a painful non-lethal crowd control device, to a shooting battle with bullets going both ways over (an maybe throgh) the crowd.
Are you famliar with “Bloody Sunday” in Northern Ireland, and what followed?
One day after such a battle in the USA, Congress would pass all sorts of “emergency” decrees and freedom would be dead.
And CW2 would probably be on.