Naturally, people are concerned about sabotage, massacres, and crime in general, but many of the policies that individuals advocate to reduce these problems will have the effect of destroying society and replacing it with a power structure, capital build-out, and way of life that effectively imprisons the entire population.
Consider the following features of a modern, developed country prison:
– Cameras everywhere, and monitoring of all outside and internal communications
– No protection against random searches and seizures – indeed, all sorts of searches are routine
– The ordinary prisoners are denied any sort of weapon, and many things that could be turned into weapons
– Depending on how well the prison is run, the wardens and guards can abuse the prisoners with impunity
– You are not free to leave
Now map the policy recommendations of the authoritarians against these features:
– Put cameras up on the roads/tolls, erect them on the city streets, and bug people’s computers and cellphones without any warrants or probable cause, and inspect their content automatically using computer searches (e.g. license plate tracking)
– Likewise, submit to arbitrary searches of your person and belongings at all times, and through civil forfeiture and massive fines for contempt of secret courts, be forced to give up your cash, belongings, and records at any officer’s whim
– Ban guns of all sorts, any sort of explosives, and in general any dangerous food, drug, or other activity
– By excessively trusting police, you wind up with any number of abuses e.g. excessive use of force on Eric Garner & Freddie Gray without prompt medical attention, and even outright murders like John Geer (for brevity, we’ll pretend none of this ever happened to any black people before 2015)
– Confiscate passports and put people under house arrest or even jail without any effective right of appeal or habeas corpus
These are many of the more generous/reasonable/mainstream of the policy proposals offered. As for banning of religion, concentration camps, and other such more severe measures used by/implemented in prisons around the world…well, it only gets worse.
When using conventional attribution, we would not necessarily accuse people of directly plotting to turn the countries of the West into prisons, particularly since many people who advocate these policies don’t even advocate all of them. However, as with gun bans on assault rifles and handguns, the fact that groups of advocates do not propose the full set of policies doesn’t save you from these policies’ combined effects.
Indeed, some people even want to live in a prison. Elderly Japanese sometimes “hold up” convenience stores for this purpose. People that have been on the inside sometimes find the routine and limitations comforting.
Question is – is that what you want?