The Ethics of Disarmement

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

dissolving the logic of weapons through presence, lucidity, and refusal

This is not a proposal for legislation.
It is not a diplomatic appeal.
It is disarmament that begins not with treaties, but with the body.
The gun is not just a weapon. It is a logic.
To disarm is not only to remove the object — it is to dismantle the conditions that made it necessary.
This text is a slow incision into the psyche of armament, a deactivation of the mythology that sustains it, and a call for the return of an unarmed presence capable of rendering violence obsolete.

The gun is a symptom, not a cause.
It appears when trust collapses. When fear is institutionalized.
When the world becomes illegible and bodies become threats.
The gun is a prosthetic — a desperate extension of control where presence has failed.

To disarm, one must go before the gun.
Before the paranoia. Before the performance of strength.

Disarmament begins not with removal,
but with the restoration of meaning.

Weapons are rituals of projection.
They are not neutral.
Every gun contains a belief system:
That safety is achieved through threat.
That peace is maintained by force.
That control is more valuable than contact.

To hold a gun is to say:
“I no longer trust the world to meet me softly.”
Disarmament is the act of saying:
“I will meet the world as it is —
and I will not disappear.”

To be armed is to anticipate betrayal.
Guns encode a reality where others are always potentially enemies.
They prepare the body for rupture.
They do not protect presence — they preempt it.

To disarm is to stop rehearsing the moment of attack.
It is to return to the unguarded body.
To become someone for whom tenderness is not a risk, but a foundation.

Empires require arms. But you are not an empire.
You do not need to conquer.
You do not need to defend territory.
You do not need to embody threat in order to survive.

Empires arm themselves because they are hollow.
Because they fear being touched.

You — in your unarmed state — are already whole.
You do not need to posture.
You do not need to perform danger.
You are already beyond reach.

Disarmament is not pacifism. It is radical intimacy.
It is the willingness to be fully present without weapons,
without scripts,
without exit strategies.

It is not submission —
it is sovereignty.

A person who is truly present is disarming.
Because they cannot be used.
Because they cannot be provoked.
Because their being is too lucid for war.

The gun cannot survive where presence is complete.
It becomes absurd.
Unnecessary.
Excessive.

The gun feeds on absence —
on severed relations,
on deferred grief,
on disembodied logic.

To disarm is to return.
To one’s body.
To others.
To a form of trust that is not naive,
but chosen.

Disarm others by becoming unshootable.
Not because you are armored —
but because there is nothing to attack.

No performance.
No threat.
No mirror of violence.

To become unshootable is to become real.
And the real is immune to empire’s hallucinations.

Disarmament is not the absence of weapons.
It is the presence of something stronger:
Integrity.
Clarity.
A refusal to perform fear.

Be so lucid they cannot aim at you.
Be so whole they forget why they armed themselves.
Be so fiercely unarmed that the world begins to fall quiet —
not out of defeat,
but because violence can no longer find a reason to exist.

Addendum: The Possibility of the Armed Woman

To disarm is not to strip all bodies of protection — it is to ask why the weapon is held, and how.

There are those who carry guns as compensation, as mask, as projection. And there are those — few — who carry them as a form of clarity. Not to threaten, but to refuse disappearance.

A woman who carries a gun does not contradict the ethic of disarmament — if her presence remains sovereign, if the weapon is not her voice but her punctuation. Not an instrument of paranoia, but a boundary carved from knowing too much.

She does not perform violence. She contains it.

The empire arms itself out of fragility. She arms herself from within a lucid history of erasure — and says: not this time.

Disarmament is not universal pacification. It is ethical discernment.

And sometimes, in the ruins of a world that devours the unguarded, a woman with a gun is not a paradox — but a flame that knows how to hold its shape.