FiveThirtyEight has a piece titled "Gun Deaths in America"

[sarisataka]

9. Consider this analogy

You are a doctor who has a patient with a high fever. First you give acetaminophen to control the fever. While it helps, the fever is still to high so you give more. When that doesn't work you move on to other fever reducing drugs, ice baths and so on. Yet despite everything the patient is still sick. Why? -You have never treated the underlying disease

It is similar with gun violence. Society is the patient. Gun violence is the fever. You can treat it with gun control but no matter how much you throw at it, you are only treating a symptom. The disease lies elsewhere. At some point you must look beyond the symptom and treat the disease to actually benefit the patient. This is why gun control ultimately fails, it looks only at the symptom and believes if it can just fix that everything is fine.

Treating a disease is difficult. Symptoms, whether fever or gun violence, can indicate more than one disease. A fever can be anything from the flu to the plague or a myriad of other things. Similarly gun violence can stem from poverty to mental health to many other things. Curing a disease is not easy and curing a society is even harder. But if we do not work to that as well as combating gun violence but merely pat ourselves on the back saying "at least they weren't victims of gun violence" we have failed ourselves.