Gun Violence: symptom or disease?

Building from a comment I left in Obvious To Me's diary Get Rid of the Guns, I wonder if we as a community are missing out on other ways to reduce gun violence in this country that we can agree on.

There is obviously a lot of passion in both sides of the debate, and while we may disagree on whether or not guns should be legal, I think we can all agree that reducing gun violence is a good and worthy cause. So I ask, is gun violence the symptom or the disease? Are there things in our culture that lead us to use guns to commit violence, or to commit any other form of violence for that matter, that we can agree on fixing that would lead to our common purpose, to reduce gun violence in this country?

Follow me below the fold and lets see if we can work this out.

How about instead of more gun laws, we fix some other things instead.

First, actually finance our schools and their after school programs to keep kids, who often end up in gangs, off the streets. Less gangs equals less gang violence.

Growing up in a working poor neighborhood, I remember all too well the boredom that led to walking around looking for trouble. The older we got, the more it escalated. But all anyone did was blame us for acting out, instead of offering us something to do, a place to go, anything to occupy our time and our minds. If we never give a young person a chance, we shouldn't be surprised when they end up in a gang. And once they are in, it is much harder to save them.

Second, keep abortion legal and educate and support women who have abusive spouses. The abortion part is in relation to the book Freakonomics, in short less children in situations prone to lead to violence, less violence.

As for abuse in the home, which can end and sometimes does end in the husband murdering the wife and even children, we need to strengthen our sisters choices and fight the image of the patriarchal male. Also, better funding of womens shelters to get women out of these situations before murder is committed. I have spoken with women who have said they wouldn't leave because they felt they had no place to go. From dead beat dads to a society that in some corners still looks down on single moms, there is a lot out there that keeps women in marriages that are not only unhealthy but down right dangerous.

Tying them together I would add that I have know too many people who got married because of an oops pregnancy only to end up hating each other later. Stop this, stop at least one avenue for violence. Keep abortion legal.

Three, end the war on drugs. Suck the life blood out of organized and street crime. Look what happened after prohibition ended. Spend the money we waste on prisons and poisoning third world countries and create real education and real rehabilitation.

Forth, enforce the laws we have now. I know, old argument, but still worth mentioning. We call for more legislation, more laws when in reality what we need is to fund the agencies that are there now so they can do their jobs. We have enough laws, too many if you ask me. But our police are underpaid, our courts are overloaded, and to a degree our politicians are too timid. Our enforcers need resources to do their jobs protecting us.

Fifth, reexamine our society. When people are getting stressed out enough to shoot strangers on the freeways, its time to reconsider our work load in this country. When children are playing video games where the whole point is to kill as many random people on the streets as they can, we really need to rethink the message we are sending the young.

I also think that overall our society is suffering from stress that comes from a combination of an overload of information, economic fears, and a lack of trust in ones neighbors thanks to the ever moving about working class. Has our success made us sick?

And sixth, stop glorifying violence period. Our history as taught in public school is nothing but one event of people killing other people after another. We are trained from childhood to see murder as an acceptable and honorable way to solve a dispute. From television to books, violence is held up as noble; killing the bad guys in the streets or proving we don't take no shit from anyone.  

I know none of this will end gun violence, I am just looking for other issues that liberals can support that could decrease the level of gun violence in this country. I wonder if we are we missing things we can agree on that can help us reach our common goal of reducing overall violence.

Instead of focusing on guns, maybe the better move is to treat the causes of the violence. Gun prohibition has proved endless times to be a stalemate. Even here we have become divided into camps. If we worked together instead on the issues that lead to what we want to stop, maybe we can at least reduce the violence while also solving other problems along the way.

Any thoughts?