The tools of a dictator are also the tools of ordinary law enforcement.

Oppressive measures are seldom effective at their stated purposes: people are not safer in totalitarian states than they are in those with human rights. They're just unsafe for different reasons. Being at the mercy of a well-resourced mob of armed goons with official backing is not better than being preyed on by a number of small, disorganised non-state groups.

Look at arming police in the US. The end result is thousands of people per year being killed or maimed by those police. And yet crime rates are no lower than in countries where the police are less homicidal.

Similarly, pervasive surveillance captures a vast volume of largely irrelevant information, leading to the use of automated threat detection systems that invariably generate false positives that cause innocent people's lives to be ruined. Yet there is no protection from threats from state actors and their collaborators who act with impunity.

“some of your children are going to die because of this bill I am proposing, and that is an acceptable loss I am willing to pay to ensure our children get to live in a democracy.”

It's a false tradeoff. Adoption of increasingly authoritarian measures is not a free lunch and has the potential to kill even more children for other reasons. The costs of operating a surveillance society, with all its IT, weapons and snitches, have to be paid somehow. Typically that money comes from dismantling services that actually protect people's lives and health. They're sure as shit not going to take it from the military or the police.