that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws.

I dunno. Sounds like he’s not opposed to them, just doesn’t think that they’re effective without going after root-cause issues. (…Which, I would like to point out, is one of the huge fucking problems that people in favor of banning guns have. E.g., address the root causes of violence, and you stop the violence without curtailing the civil right.) He doesn’t seem to have a problem with addressing the root causes so that there’s no need for the laws in the first place, and doesn’t appear to be arguing against the things he lists as being ‘social ills’ in the first place. (He did think that the youth of his time were declining morally, which is a tale that goes back to at least the Greek city-states.)

Fundamentally though, yeah, laws alone rarely change behavior; you need to change the material and social conditions to change behavior.