Definitions
I spent a lot of time on liberal websites and publication sites today following this guy around. None of them think he's an idiot, so yeah, I'm still worried. I'm glad you had fun with it.
Bullets aren't the only options in a tyranny. When everything one does is controlled by the State, fines, imprisonment, and other non-lethal punishments are usually enough. The largest population in the Soviet Gulags at one time was about 1.7 million, less than one percent of the population. The rest just obeyed.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II; Book Four, Chapter VI