I come from an tight-knit immigrant family. One thing I've learned from my parents and grandparents is that you can be poor, you can even be oppressed, and yet endure if you have others.
It was not tight-knit poor family.
But as I read in a book about systems: it's a lot more comforting to think that the problem is somewhere "out there", rather than confronting the fact that our system is setting up people to fail.
It's a lot easier to point at guns and say, "let's get these off the streets!", rather than confront the more difficult reality of everything I mentioned.