No EyeR,
They are for both defense and offense, if I use a knife to DEFEND myself from an attacker. That means the knife was ABLE to be used for DEFENDING against attack and that's what defense is! Which clearly and irrefutably shows that weapons are for both defense and offense. It does not matter if you cause the attacker physical harm with the weapon. That does not make you fending off their attack any less of a DEFENSIVE measure. Dude, mitigated weaponry!!? There is no such thing as mitigated weaponry, just stop and thinking about it for a minute. To mitigate means to lessen whatever is being mitigated and a weapon is well, a weapon. So, what you are saying is to make a weapon less of a weapon, which is by all means impossible because there aren't degrees of weaponry. If something is a weapon it is a weapon period and you can not make it less of one.
The absence of weaponry does not have squat to do with whether or not there is incentive to require it! That is decided by other factors, factors like, does your opponent have weapons?, are you intending to do something that requires you to have a weapon?, do you find yourself in a position of having to fend off an attack?, and so on. So? No one said anything regarding thinking of weapons as intended solely to cause harm. So, stop with the irrelevent bull and as far as the peaceful use of space goes. There is no such thing, you can not use space in any way shape or form. You can colonize, explore, and study it but, you can not use space. There is nothing to use, that is why we call it space and not resources. Space can be studied, colonized, and explored peacefully just not on a permanent basis. So, people should get used to the idea because, not everyone exploring space will be peace loving and regardless of our intent. If we run into trouble not of our own making. We will have to resort to violence to defend ourselves it is that simple and when we do. We will have failed the false idea of the peaceful use of space even though we had no choice!
@Scarbs,
Because we as a species are not there yet that is why