That was my thought; law-abiding people would band together for mutual defense, like the Minutemen or old-school militias. Gated and walled communities would become extremely common, and essentially all you’d have for the Purge to be effective would be the poorer areas of town.
I imagine commercial architecture would become quite different in a hurry- commercial developments would probably end up more like castles, with ditches/moats and berms with walls, and gatehouses to protect the entrances.
I imagine you’d still have the occasional people killing their spouses or whatever because they won’t be prosecuted, but I imagine that the sort of gang-driven looting and mass chaos and hysteria from the movies wouldn’t really happen.
Everybody who could would hunker down, or man the walls, if they aren’t looking to do criminal stuff, which would mean that anyone moving around outside the walls would be a legitimate target to the people on the walls.
This is pretty much explicitly stated in the latest film, Purge: Election Year. The whole thing is a (cliche alert) Christian (cliche alert) Right-Wing (cliche alert) conspiracy to get rid of the homeless and other undesirables, for the poor to winnow themselves, and as a means of disguising the elimination of political enemies.
Derleth brings up an interesting idea. All the fat cat Wall Street types could just wait for the one day of the year when they get to do all their insider trading, bribery, industrial espionage, naked short selling, etc. Insurance agencies get to dump all their cancer patients, pension funds and 401ks get raided, stolen credit card numbers get maxed out… It would be a field day for white collar crime.
I have no real interest in watching the Purge movies. But it would be cool if they did it in a documentary or oral history format, where “survivors” are interviewed for their stories. I think that would be more interesting.
I see no reason why the stock market and banks couldn’t just shut down for 12 hours.
Most people would band together and wait it out. If you really wanted to kill your neighbor three doors down, you’d have to risk going out in public to do it, and your scumbag neighbor probably knows you don’t like him, and would be prepared for that.
Most people who got killed would be people who were also out to kill, so no great loss.
If you’re worried about embezzlers looting the banks on Purge Night, you just have contingency plans. Banks will be closed for 72 hours, the day before Purge, the day of Purge, and the day after Purge. And they’ll take all their servers offline. No banking, no deposits, no withdrawals, no interest, no nothing.
Of course, it makes stealing on Purge Night kind of weird. Like, if you go over to your neighbor’s house, and kill him and his family, and occupy the house and write yourself a deed to the house, and next morning when everyone asks what happens you just say that you stole the house during the Purge. Hey, stealing is legal during the Purge! So it’s yours now.
Heck, why not just have some clerk down at the county office change all the deeds to make himself the owner. He stole everyone’s house on Purge Night, it’s legal.
Yeah, and my post was a few weeks prior to the release of the movie.
Anyway, I don’t doubt that there would be a lot of mutual defense in the poorer parts of down, but I also suspect that the number of people who look forward to it like Xmas morning would be greater there as well. So basically what **levdrakon **said…