People do value their lives and liberty and (for all the memes to the contrary) the police are very good at hunting down murderers of high-value targets because most challenges the police face are challenges of focus and resource-allocation and cities tend to authorize a spare-no-expense approach to something perceived as a direct attack on the fundamentals of the status quo. Consider the full-scale house-to-house manhunt after the Boston Marathon bombing as an example case.

So I think most people know that if you come at the king, you are definitely throwing your future away (and Americans, for all the complaining, tend to be comfortable / hopeful enough that they don't want to do that).