Peaceful protestors don't throw rocks.

Peaceful protestors actually know what they are protesting.

Want a great example of peaceful protests? How about the TEA Party protests? These people actually cleaned up after themselves, and didn't have to have the riot police be called in.

Its a nice thought to equip yourself in similar gear, but the average person is not going to spend the money on such gear because its not cheap. All told I've probably spent 500$ or more on my various pieces of tactical gear (Blackhawk drop leg rigs are bleepin expensive) and thus wont be apt to clothe themselves in gear. Then you have the fact that anybody seen wearing say a gas mask who is not in police uniform and load out will likely be seen as an even greater threat than the vanilla protester. And yes in some place such gear is illegal, such as body armor or facial coverings, so you just give them more charges to hit you with when they catch you, and unless you run they will most certainly catch, detain, charge and likely convict you of several offenses.

LOL. Buy gear to look like them. That is truly silly. Instead, lets dress and express our selves exactly how we want to because we are free Americans. We should show up in the millions. I don't think a few dozen policemen will stand up against a million angry Americans.

It didn't look like there were that many protesters. The police had to expand into the University area and rake in students going to & from class to have anyone to beat up. The police had a lot of new equipment and new techniques learned from DHS to employ and did the best they could to beat up the protesters they had available. This was like the War in Vietnam. Whenever you give your military new weapons and new powers they will want to use them. We have given our military a lot of powerful weapons, even HAARP. Google the May 08 China earthquake. They seem to be using them. Now we've given them riot gear to use against civilians and have obligingly shredded our constitution for them, so what do we expect.
We sent our military to kill innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan to defend our liberty from mythical al Qaeda. What is more devastating is that we've given them the ability to say when the war is won or ended, therefore it will go on forever. There are always more innocent people to kill, we will never find al Qaeda because besides being assets of the CIA they never existed, so we can never defeat them so we can go on fighting forever until liberty is totally defended and the Nazi Rockefellers are ruling us