Illegal drugs are the major source of gangs and gang violence. Dealing with the gangs' income reduces gang violence, and lowers gun deaths. Talking about how to reduce gang shootings is talking about gang shootings.
Not actually true. Illegal drugs are currently the major source of gang income, but not the gangs themselves or the violence.
Gangs are a result of many factors, but the main one is in the form of angry, young men who feel disenfranchised by the system, bonding together to create the family and culture that they feel they have been deprived of by society.
The most likely person to become a gang member is a young minority race male who's father is absent by way of being dead or in jail, whose mother is often struggling to support the family financally, often by working multiple jobs, and who has done poorly in a school system designed to create blue collar working clones who follow instructions.
They generally see little for them in the normal world, without an education that the system won't give to them in a way that actually allows them to learn, they will never escape the poverty trap they are in. With no male role models other than those they find on the streets, a need for support and love from family that their shatter home doesn't give, and a desire to reclaim some sort of culture that they feel western society has stripped from them, the gangs offer those things and so are attractive to them, even before factoring in a source of easy money that will allow them to help their families out of the mire of poverty.
For kids from the poorest ethnic neighbourhoods, gangs are a way to recover what they feel society has robbed them of. Security, family, and a chance to escape from the poverty they are in. Is it really any surprise that these individuals feel that they aren't part of the rest of society and can live by their own rules instead of those of a society that they feel has opressed and abandoned them, that hates them, and can offer them no future but a jail cell?
Making drugs legal won't destroy the gang problem, they'll just move to something else, or just keep selling drugs legitimately. You won't get rid of gangs until you solve the real problem... wealth inequality, an education system that fails its most needy students, and the disenfranchising of minorities.
