My childhood in the middle of the last century was spent in an old industrial suburb on Chicago’s far south side. For the most part, townsfolk were good people, but the city was also home to the south side headquarters of Chicago’s Al Capone gang. Shootings were rare, but when they did happen, it was gangsters shooting each other.

No one feared being shot at school, church, shopping for groceries, attending a concert or athletic event, or simply walking or driving through the community. Assault weapons were confined to the military, and only cops and crooks carried guns. Most of us felt safe in our hometown and our country.

Consider the gruesome news from a weekend last May when our local focus was on our tulip festival.

Gun violence is so prevalent in the United States that we no longer muster outrage. Merely resignation. We are awash in guns, allowing people with no assault training to buy assault weapons, and imposing virtually no limitation on where guns can be carried. We are a nation where guns outnumber people. No one believes any longer that gun violence can be cured by legislation. A 10-year assault weapon ban enacted in 1994 was allowed to lapse in 2004, and courts have routinely discarded limitations on who can carry weapons, along with where, when and how.

There is a soul-sickness that seems rampant among many of our citizens that begs for a cure. Mental illness fuels some violence — so does racial hatred, unbridled anger, fear, feelings of hopelessness or insignificance, absence of role models, abject poverty, alienation, abuse, neglect, isolation and a host of other factors. Some children may be so damaged by adulthood that there is no cure, but there are two approaches I believe would be a step toward intercepting violence.

We need to be aggressive about education, not just through high school but beyond. But not on the financial backs of young kids or their families. And not necessarily at boutique colleges or universities. Yuval Harari warns that rampant advances in artificial intelligence and technology risk creating a “useless class” of people with no economic value.

When yesterday’s welder was replaced by a robotic welder on the assembly line, he could always find a job as a checkout cashier at the local supermarket. But when technology eliminates those jobs, he can’t simply segue to an open radiologist or physical therapist job. Not without specific and sophisticated training.

And it’s happening. Assembly lines are robots. ATMs have replaced tellers. Car washes are now automated. We order at Taco Bell on a touchpad with pictures. We talk to voice-recognition devices instead of people. Whenever a machine becomes cheaper than a person on a payroll, the machine gets the job. Opportunities for middle class living by marginally educated people are disappearing. We need to give continuing education the same priority we give battleships and ballistic missiles to reduce the risk of leaving people on the margins, or worse yet, beyond.

We also need to establish a program of compulsory national service. For everyone. Military should be just one of several options. Grunt work should be coupled with training. Young people would be pulled out of hurtful or hopeless environments. Racial and ethnic mixing would be inevitable. Sociopathic tendencies would be unveiled, monitored, and hopefully treated.

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I’m not so naive as to believe these approaches would eliminate gun violence. And yes, they’d be costly. But global military domination is meaningless if incivility and violence become our national norm and masses of people slide into economic irrelevance. We need intervention, and we need to pay for it. Without such commitments, I fear for the country I see us becoming.

— Community Columnist Dale Wyngarden is a resident of the city of Holland. He can be reached at wyngarden@ameritech.net.