If You're Not Still A Pacifist With A Gun In Your Hand, You Were Never Actually A Pacifist At All

The title line is why I'm so comfortable with mandatory weaponization.

Disarmament favors the physically strong. It favors the battering husband over his wife and the fifteen children he raped out of her. It favors the obsessively well-trained bigot over the quiet guy who studied something more pro-social than punching bags. Disarmament favors people who long for strength, because even though it takes away an extreme of strength from them, it also takes that extreme of strength away from others. When reduced in this way to a more basic level, the relative advantage that people can get through brutish, primitive methods of seeking strength is dramatically magnified. When people from violent inner city environments or otherwise gang-controlled environments support gun control, I can't help suspecting that some of them know full well that they're proposing to deepen the advantage of the brutal over the harmless. The guy who would dissolve into tears over shooting someone else and be psychologically ruined by the act still CAN do it with a firearm, when otherwise he'd just die, and that means that with high weaponization a lot of the people who get murdered are the would-be murderers instead of their intended victims. It's not a coincidence that medieval societies were more murderous with spears, swords, and crossbows than America is with ubiquitous handguns. Humanity got a lot more peaceful once it invented a simple point-and-click interface for murder that could no longer be improved upon by the deranged pursuit of might - but in NationStates, an invention that brought peace to Earth would be treated as leading only to mass murder!

I therefore consider weaponization as a secondary measurement of pacifism, as important or almost as important as the semblance of pacifism itself. In a perfect world, they should both rise together. The higher weaponization gets, the more complete the dominance of pacifists get, because the people who can organize large flows of resources without having them dissolve in brainless violence and hatred are advantaged in such systems. NationStates reverses this, and it's another way that it's a horrible pit of joyless abuse normalization. The people who would take strength away from others and leave them helpless are evil, and in refusing to seek in their own nature the harmony of self-and-other, they lead towards perpetual warfare over sources of strength instead of a society that finds an honest capacity of peace.

If people honestly don't want to kill each other, weaponization may go down because people simply forego weapons, but NationStates doesn't really seem to model that potential in humanity. For instance, Scorvkent is inexplicably treated as having restrictive gun laws, despite its historic rule of "Scorvkentians can kill people if they're polite about it". (To be fair, there's also an implicit "and don't get caught" in Scorvkent, as the nation does try to maintain public order and some amount of diverse expressive rights as well.) If NationStates was a fairer simulation, Scorvkent should really be lower in pacifism than most of Rafaiad, because overwhelmingly the #1 thing that has impaired "pacifism" in Rafaiad is the pursuit of a just peace that hasn't even been pursued in Scorvkent. This simulation treats pacifism as crazy screaming violence, and if it weren't for the hidden civil rights graph at least having the decency to show some corruption of rights in Scorvkent, I would think that it was treating Scorvkent's bloodthirst as basic sainthood. It still does insist on showing my least pacifistic nation as my most pacifistic nation. So wildly backwards. Pacifist nations don't have to regulate firearms.

Is this kind of reversal why narcissistic authoritarians were allowed to seize power IRL? The compulsory weaponization issue prompt itself suggests that possibility: that the government is uncontrollable in its destruction of political freedoms if pacifists aren't given the right to survive against violent threats to their health. Yet it still crushes pacifism! So wrong.

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I don't really know why so many people IRL have so much trouble with this idea. Maybe it comes more naturally to a dragon. It seems to me that if you can't live for a thousand years with a flamethrower on your jaw, you must be really missing something in how you evaluate social situations. I mean, not that I was a firebreather, but it's the principle of the thing, because I did still have fire. I used it overwhelmingly peacefully. If I'd had a peaceful society around me in my last life, I would happily have used my fire exclusively peacefully. It's kind of like how it isn't always a lie when nations run their armies from a "Ministry of Defense": sometimes defensive militarism is an extremely honest thing. Sometimes the purpose of the existence of a weapon is to reduce the need for using any weapons at all. I think Earth shows my argument's validity IRL, and that humanity gained a lot of benefit from the weapons that nobody wants to use.