This says nothing of the fact that knife wounds, blunt force trauma, whatever, are all MUCH easier to deal with on a medical level, and the fact that you can't stab or beat 30+ people to death in a short span of time the way you can shoot people with a semiautomatic, magazine-fed rifle.

Taking guns affects gun crimes.

Addressing the societal/cultural/economic issues affects guns, knives, bombs, cars, bludgeons, and barehanded crimes.

Knives are used to kill three times more often than rifles. For ever 100 rifle killings, there are another 300 knife killings. Consider these 400 crimes, and take all the rifles. All of them. Assume 100% effectiveness: all rifle crimes are eliminated, and none of the rifle-criminals switch to knives. Best case scenario, 25% effectiveness; 300 of those 400 are dead.

Now, focus on the socioeconomic conditions that lead people to kill. Focus on the murderous intent. Your social/cultural approach only needs to have 25% effectiveness to achieve the same result. When we target the whole of the problem, we don't even have to be very good at it to achieve phenomenal results.

To answer your question, yes, we can do something useless and pointless, and address the societal issues, and work the actual problem.

What we can't do is just the useless, pointless something, without addressing the social issues, and expect anything to actually improve.

We must enact universal healthcare. We must fundamentally address economic disparity with a punitively high top-tier tax rate like we had until the 1970's and 80's. We must address food insecurity, housing insecurity.

We must soften or eliminate criminal sanctions for non-violent offenses, and we must throw away the key for habitual violent offenders, a

Did I say mental health? It's not mental health. It's socioeconomic despair. It's a societal issue, a cultural issue.

You want to see a strong correlation with violence? Look at age of motherhood. The mean age of women when they have their first child.

Australia and Europe commonly wait until they are in their 30's to have children. The average child in these areas is raised by mature, economically stable adults. Murder rates in these areas are a tiny fraction of the world rate.

Compare to Central and South America, where the average mother is 18 to 22, and the murder rates are large multiples of the world rate.

The correlation holds true across nations, across regions, across cities, across demographics. If you know the age of a motherhood in a given area, you can predict the homicide rate in that area. If you know the homicide rate, you can predict the age of motherhood.

Contrast with guns, where the nation with by far the highest access to guns in the world has a homicide rate well below the world average. The rural areas of that nation have near universal gun ownership, yet the violence is clustered in impoverished areas, where the majority of the population doesn't actually have guns.

Turns out it's not actually the guns. It is the motivations of the people carrying them. When those people are figuratively beaten into submission, living paycheck to paycheck with no legitimate prospects, no way to get ahead, saddled with debt, no equity... Violence is not a gun problem. It's not a mental health problem. Violence is what happens when you systematically subjugate people, and some of them decide they don't need to obey. Violence is a socioeconomic problem. It is a cultural problem. More specifically, it is a problem of corporate culture, where people do everything they can to take everything they can from everyone they can, and give back as little as they can to as few as they can.

We need universal healthcare. We need to eliminate food insecurity. We need to eliminate housing insecurity.

We need to restore the protections we had against 19th century robber barons. Specifically, we need to reinstate a confiscatory top-tier tax rate. The only people that businessmen hate paying more than workers is the IRS. A confiscatory tax rate forces them to choose between the two.

We need to kill the concept of "renting". We need to create a owner-occupant credit against residential property taxes, to hold them where they are, or lower them slightly for anyone living in their own properties. A "landlord" who wants that tax credit will have to issue a "land contract" (rent-to-own arrangement, recorded with the county) or a private mortgage to secure the occupant's credit against that property's taxes. The occupant will then be paying a fixed rate for the duration of the contract, and will be earning equity.

It is much more feasible to fix those three factors than to enact any form of gun control, and any of those factors will reduce violent crime far more than even a total confiscation could ever hope to achieve.