Brother Against Brother, Quicksilver Against Scarlet Witch, Jamie Madrox Against Himself…

Marvel Comics' big summer crossover is apparently going to be an event called Civil War, a hero-vs.-hero free-for-all prompted by the introduction of a Super-Human Registration Act—basically a version of the Mutant Registration Act that's been a mainstay of the X-books for decades that doesn't irrationally distinguish between people with the power to level entire cities because of their freaky genes (who we keep an eye on) and people with the power to level entire cities because a gamma-irradiated mongoose spit in their baby formula. Folks like Iron Man and Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four end up supporting it; Captain America, Dr. Strange, Wolverine, and a bunch of others are opposed. Hijinks ensue.

The whole thing is being pitched pretty explicitly as a War on Terror allegory, with press kits describing the central theme as "How much freedom is it necessary to give up to have security?'" I've got to wonder though, is anyone here a sufficiently hardcore civil libertarian that if people existed who really could (say) wipe out the whole of humanity in a few minutes just by thinking really hard about it (as it's implied Professor X would be capable of in X-Men 2), you wouldn't maybe want someone keeping tabs on them? It's nice that they're trying to do something "relevant" and all, but setting it up in a world where there are thousands of people walking around with the equivalent of a few nukes worth of destructive power in their bodies probably skews the balance of considerations there in a way that makes heavier state surveillance seem like a better idea.