I think it's part of a larger social dynamic. I guess the metaphor might be that it's easy to never have to restrain a dog when all you have is golden retriever puppies, when you have room full of dobermans it becomes a different story. A lot of our idealized thinking about liberty, freedom, and sanctions at the institutional political and legal level was developed in a society where social and religious constraints on behavior were very powerful. IOW, it's easy to over idealize how committed you are to things like free speech and action legally in a society where no-one will ever say the most destructive things anyway because of other levels of deep social constraint.
As we find ourselves in a society where behavior has fewer and fewer sources of control outside formal institutional rule/legal structures, we are finding out that those don't work so well all by themselves.