A gun will give you the body, not the bird
Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.
Any community's arm of force—military, police, security—needs people in it who can do necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.
I'd...bet enthusiasm for 'ethnic cleansing' will wane if only sticks and rocks are available for the warring parties.
Society's preservation against the unlimited violence of scandals lies in the mimetic coalition against the single victim and its ensuing limited violence. The violent death of Jesus is, humanly speaking, an example of this strange process.
One of the biggest challenges of writing for middle-grade or even young-adult readers is that I don't want to have too much violence in it - which really limits what you can do. It's important that they're not just bloodbaths or glorifying violence. I always try to show that a person who dies leaves a hole. There's grief in my books.
