All government mandates are enforced at the barrel of a gun.
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.
So is enforcement of contracts between private parties. Are you against private property as well?
If we are, neither private contracts nor vaccine mandates are directly enforced at the barrel of a gun - the RCMP aren't busting down people's doors to shoot them for failing to get vaccinated, just as people aren't immediately killed by the feds for violating legal contracts.
If we're talking about how they're ultimately enforced, if all else fails...well, they're both enforced the same way.
For private disputes, it’s also not uncommon to have an armed officer help enforcement. Consider an extremely common private contract dispute - an eviction - where the police may come to remove the tenant.
The “barrel of a gun” is of course a metaphor, but first order enforcement can be closer than you think.
By and large, the government does not come take away your freedom for breach of private party contracts. There are some exceptions, where we wrote law (government mandate) elevating some types of private party contract.
But generally, no, me violating your NDA won't escalate to the government shooting me, no matter how uncooperative I am.
Ultimately, enforcing (almost) any law does come down to use of force if the guilty party is intransigent enough. Exceptions are when some thing can be "snatched" away and held truly inaccessible to the guilty party, such that they cannot possibly retrieve it.
Not sure what happens if you have a civil judgement entered against you and then quit having income. (Not reporting income is probably a real Crime, and they’d go after you for that)
1. debtor's prison isn't a thing anymore
2. look up "judgement-proof"
This is a nice article about immunization requirements in Canada a decade before Covid hit.
In 2011, only 3 provinces had mandates for students and also had plenty of exceptions.
And this is for vaccines with decades of use and highly effective at preventing transmission and disease.
Heck, if the right country wants you in jail for the right reasons, you could flee somewhere else and have the _Air Force_ used against you.
Maybe in some very extreme case they would, but it is better that someone escapes custody than someone (including the suspect dying).
Then again, just a cop drawing a weapon or firing a weapon usually makes the news.
They won't arrest you the next chance they get (say, when your plate shows up on a scanner)?
I'd propose that avoiding jail indefinitely will eventually lead to violence in any halfway-organized jurisdiction. And if you start shooting, eventually the government will shoot back.
All over a driving misdemeanor. We just assume that reasonable people won't let these things escalate that far, but yes: Every law written is ultimately enforced by a man (or woman) with a gun.
Bottom line: If you are not a danger to anyone, they will let you escape rather than kill anyone (including you), even if it means you are never brought to justice.
It makes a lot of sense, if you don't have a revenge based justice system.