Given that this thread, already on very thin ice and skating toward open water, is now on chaosmagnet's VERY short leash, I will add a small comment or two. And then duck-and-cover under my desk.

Words are important. The words "Martial Law" evoke the deepest of all fears. That's the reason such threads go ugly in seconds flat.

But standing back from such galvanizing words, it's important to recognize that all democracies, by practical necessity, have prior legislated measures available for dealing with a variety of emergency situations. If these are designed to be scalable to the problem at hand, and temporary in duration, and subject to scrutiny afterwards, they are not automatically the soul of all evil. They are nothing more than the best that can be done in a bad situation.

My 2c.