Excellent summation of the obvious, Bob, but you are overlooking the root cause of who was taking the law into their own hands.
That would be the feckless pols who ordered the police to stand down and who refused offers of federal help from President Trump. Those hacks essentially 'took the law into their own hands' by suspending the law and allowing sociopaths like the guys who were shot to burn and destroy businesses and lives.
The sociopaths themselves were essentially doing the same because, even at the sub-human level of their thought processes, they must have known they were breaking the law.