good analogy...and while doing something about Sam would be the right/best thing to do, taking the gun away from him is going to have to happen before you can detain him (or, at least, would make him "less" dangerous).
I mean, if you take race away from people that for the life of them can't imagine a world without their racial lenses, you don't think that would be a quantum leap (<-misnomer) toward them reanalyzing their western minds?