[TomSmedley]

Maybe the way to institute a police state is to have no control over the criminal element -

The "socially friendly" (criminal) elements kept the soviet gulags under control.

[headsonpikes]

You're onto their little secret.

This is the logic of the State; always has been, always will be.

[jodorowsky]

"In the (Soviet) Criminal Code of 1926 there was a most stupid Article 139 -- 'on the limits of necessary self-defense' -- according to which you had the right to unsheath your knife only after the criminal's knife was hovering over you. And otherwise you would be the one put on trial... This fear of exceeding the measure of necessary self-defense led to total spinelessness as a national characteristic...

"The state, in its Criminal Code, forbids citizens to have firearms or other weapons, but does not itself undertake to defend them! The state turns its citizens over to the power of the bandits -- and then through the press dares to summon them to 'social resistance' against these bandits..."

Solzhenitsyn, "Gulag Archipelago", Vol 3, Chapter 16