The small arms agenda remains almost exclusively reactive, responding mostly to the needs of the states that finance small arms diplomacy and fieldwork. NGOs and research institutes, tied to government priorities, have been unable to develop an independent voice. Activists have sought influence over small arms politics instead by broadening their agenda to include related social pathologies. This strategy, pragmatic in the short term, threatens the integrity and durability of small arms activism in the long run. It has allowed small arms activism to prosper without articulating the kind of goals necessary to sustain it. Instead of clear goals, the field has been guided largely by images, including art, represented in this essay by Carl Fredrik Reutersward's Non-Violence. To assure its health and influence, small arms activism, research and policy requires greater control over its agenda. Instead of relying on aesthetic inspiration and the tendency to broaden its agenda, the field requires deeper engagement with core concerns. This can only come through articulation of goals to explicitly reduce the role of firearms in human affairs. The place for such action is less in the United Nations and more through national campaigns, focusing on states, the only bodies that actually own and regulate guns.
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