It's not lack of education, it's lack of responsibility. With great freedom comes great responsibility and face it, most humans lack that.

The re-allocation of police resources would (probably) result in 10 to 100 times as many border-control or customs agents and, while there would still be the possibility of small quantities of drugs being imported by individuals, large drug importing operations would lose far more drugs than they imported and prices of these drugs would skyrocket. In a similar fashion, if 10 to 100 times the resources were put towards tracking down drug manufacturing a handful of small manufacturing operations could still exist but their production could not meet demand and prices would skyrocket.

Certainly, people would not necessarily fear using these drugs, but when you're spending hundreds of dollars on a single dose of a drug it is unlikely that you will have it regularly enough to become an addict.

Oh, the sweet collectivist and utopian mindset that prevails nowadays in western politics. People fail to realize that the human being has inherent negative qualities and are naturally unequal. Maybe you can numb them by burying them on social welfare, but for how long you can sustain that situation? How is such a society growing or evolving in any way? Take South Korea and it's ruthless educational system compared to North Korea. Nature teaches us enough about what happens to your perfect, well-cared crops when you leave them to the wild.

So I say income equality is only a issue as long as it does have political or cultural bases, instead of social differences or simple merit. Believe me, the US is far past that unlike what you can find on Russia or China, for example. What you need is to discover exactly what in the american society is leading people to engage in such behavior when it did not happened in the past, and whose people are likely to fall for these based on their mental condition. Is it the influence of the media, including movies and games? Let's not come with an emotional response here just because you enjoy your new CoD and didn't become a mad killer so far. Is the lack of contact among people making harder to identify those with mental issues?

Damn. It's complicated.

Edit - when I said about inequality not being a issue anymore in the US, that's not entirely correct. So yeah, due to the tendentious facets of the media and rampant corporate speculation and lobby, there are still lots of unfair inequality in the US. Like some people getting overpaid for nothing and others earning naught for their hard work. Again, the media here. And the same for Europe. 

Personally, I think a large portion of the argument for wealth distribution and income inequality are based on a misunderstanding of what weath and income really represent ...

At its core, money represents a portion of the productive capacity of the economy and it can be exchanged for goods or services that created in the economy. Profit represents the ability to make a good or service using less production than people are willing to trade it for. Wealth is the accumulation of assets that represent substantial amounts of production, and is most often gained by efficiently managing your resources resulting in high levels of profit or investing your productive capacity with individuals who efficiently managed resources resulting in high levels of profit.

When you take away wealth from the "rich" and give it to the "poor" you are really taking the productive capacity of the economy from those who have demonstrated the best ability to manage the economy and given it to the people with the worst ability to manage the economy. Is it a surprise that the massive growth in social transfers has resulted in a consumer driven economy that imports most of its goods from China?

The money that was needed to build the factories "of the future" has been spent on cheap consumer gadgets from developing nations; and the jobs that would have been created for the unskilled labourer in the country have been exported to developing nations.

Cause War and killing people is advertised as being cool in the USA!

Yeah US Soldiers killed so and so many people!So awesome!Guns are cool!We saved the world!
Then of course combined with todays possibility of online Gaming where 5 year olds scream around,being Online gangsters and threaten everyone this is whats happening.
Cause in times where console Online FPS wasn't that detailed or possible cause they were nearly only available on "expensive" PCs kids played some other stuff.
And of course > The parents of these days seem to be garbage and too soft...If my kid would threaten to destroy the country of a person who killed him in an online game i would overthink some stuff.
Cause if they do that enough over time this will become a casual thing for them and they will think its a good thing to act like the Big Boss.

The UK didn't benefit from it.  Knife violence is on the rise and far more deadly.

Here in the US, knife violence is known as a personal crime, because usually the level of hatred necessary to plunge a knife into someone takes an amount of personal knowledge, indifference to their welfare, and hatred that only comes from knowing them.  Not to imply the victim is a bad person, simply not liked by the attacker.

In the UK, knife violence is indiscriminate.  It's also disproportionately deadlier than in the US.  Knife crime is so bad in the UK that the police are accused of falsifying reports to indicate "No Crime" rather than to properly report the knife crime.  So, in the UK, if someone is stabbed, dies, and they can't identify the assailant, it gets reported as "No Crime." 

Admittedly, more often than not, a knife crime results in a wound that is survivable, but likewise not every gun shot victim dies.

It doesn't matter what you do.  It is a part of our human nature.  People who intend to use violence to forcefully obtain  something do so.  If the weapon they bring into a situation isn't good enough, they will seek out one better.  This is no less true today than it was 20,000 years ago.

As well, regardless of armed or not, the method of attack will change.  If someone can assume someone has a gun and could use it if given time to prepare, than rather than give them  time to prepare, they'll shoot first and ask questions later.  Take away guns, and the person will acclimate themselves to the best weapon available.

The cause of gun violence in the US is the cause of crime in the US.  While you can ultimately lessen it, you will never eliminate it.  Not through wealth, free drugs, no drugs, etc, etc.  What is changing in the US is the appearance that guns are getting used more and more frequently in crimes, but that may point to the level of desperation people are dealing with, or it may point to a mental health problem in the US.

While the US doesn't have the same challenges as some countries, such as the UK, we also don't have access to mental health services like they do.  People in the US tend to be empathetic towards people with mental health disorders, where as people in the UK (from what I've seen) tend to think less of them.  So there is astigmatism in the UK that doesn't seem to exist in the US.

Actually i've read that being shot with a hand gun tends to be more survivable then being stabbed with a knife... as a knife is more likely to hit an organ, as the knife tends to rip and tear once stabbed into someone.

Of course that's individual assualts.  Guns being deadlier in the case of a mass assault cause you can hit people at range.

Wrong.

There are plenty of well-funded schools that do very, very bad (Detroit, for example).

Bad education leads to no marketable skills to earn an income off of. Therefore, bad economic inequality.

I think criminals are the leading cause of crime.

Pretty radical huh?

That's why I don't want to restrict law abiding citizens. There is no law that will ever stop a criminal from breaking the law.

I've read that it's actually every 20th bullet that is deadly. Doesn't mean you need to be shot 20 times to die, of course.

@Adinnieken: I won't argue against that, what I was saying is that gun control is a very hard thing to implement properly, requires geopolitical predisposition to work (what US doesn't have) and time. And all that to even affect gun violence, not touching crime in general.