They're suggesting that the point of an authority using this weapon on a mass of people may be to cause those people to become violent so that the authority can use the subsequent fear to justify further abuses.

Which I think is likely, but also a bad decision. Generally speaking, the job of a legitimate government is to make violent protest unnecessary. So depending on the situation, the best action may indeed be to back down and rethink how things got there in the first place, rather than continuing to provoke more violence. Continuing to escalate is not a sustainable strategy for anyone that intends to maintain power for long, as the numbers are not generally on their side.