Is repression justified when the opposition is violent ?

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I have read lots of cases in which authoritarian governments that have violently repressed any opposition even non-violent opposition. I don't know why but I seem to feel torn when I read about government repressing violent opposition as though its doing it to defend itself and I seem to think that even democratic governments in the West will use the same ruthless methods. I remember years ago in the UK, there were student riots and the armed police were brought to keep the peace and Prime Minister Cameron said at the time ''They will feel the force of the law.''.

I also remember reading that in the early 1980s, the Syrian Government almost levelled the city of Hama to the ground with bombs, shooting and other methods in order to repress the Muslim Brotherhood which had also used violence against the regime. After that, there was hardly any opposition left to oppose the regime. To me, reading about that seems to be a pretty brutal way to deal with opponents.

It feels to me as though a government has the justifiable right to even be ruthless and brutally repress its opposition even when they too are violent but may not be as violent as the government. The responses from people in the international community would be shouting that the governments are mass murderers and that their response would be that they were dealing with opposition accordingly because they were disturbing the peace, or they were terrorists, and so on.

I'm interested but can't find the answer
The premise of having the right to suppress is that it can benefit the people better than the opposition, but how to measure it is very difficult, so I don't know the answer.

The more repressive and violent a state is the more violent resistance is justified, but also, the less legitimacy that state has.

Of course, terrorists will always claim the state is violent towards them so their actions are justified. Just like many criminals claim their penalties are only meant to harm them by an evil state.

The things that matter are, I believe, two:
1. Is the reaction proportional to the actual threat? That's why we believe using violence against non-violence is wrong.
2. Overall violence in a given state - many different factors contribute here and it's the state's responsibility to manage them to the best possible effects.

It depends how violent they are and what the degree of social cohesion is. If social cohesion is low then the group in question could be an existential threat to a national system, or if not directly an existential threat letting their activity go on would heighten other threats by creating even more disorder.

The problem with violent groups is they're run by winners of violence games, like the cartels. If revolutionaries take down a government typically the revolutionaries are next to die by the hand of whoever wants to do a more totalitarian takeover - things are in flux, the revolutionaries by that point are overextended, so it's not all that hard if you have a brutally trained militia group to round them up and make them dig an open grave for themselves.