Without a gun or guns; not armed with firearms.
Compound of 'gun' (Middle Dutch 'gonne') and '-less' (Old English suffix meaning 'without'). The construction follows standard English pattern for creating negatives.
In early colonial America, the phrase 'gunless settlement' described vulnerable frontier communities, but during peacetime many societies actually stayed gunless for centuries—Japan restricted firearms for 200 years and had very little gun violence as a result.
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