This sounds scary, but is it a bad thing? It depends on the mandate but the gun barrel is generally at the end of a long chain of escalating non-cooperation th

This sounds scary, but is it a bad thing? It depends on the mandate but the gun barrel is generally at the end of a long chain of escalating non-cooperation that starts with a sternly worded letter. Some governments are more trigger-happy than others, but at least in gentler societies, to get to the point where you're looking at a gun barrel, you'd probably have to respond somewhere along that chain with significant violence yourself. In societies where you are allowed to carry a gun, the government having an even bigger gun is rather implied by the word enforced, because a mandate couldn't be called enforced if the police could only hand sternly-worded letters to you while you ignore it and shot at them.