A "glass is half empty" person might say that everyone else is "enjoying" too little violence. But I think the correlation between a violent and a creative society is likely to be very weak. See also Rome.
There is a famous Orson Wells quote hidden in there dying to get out. Cuckoo clocks.As to your "I'd like to change how freely accessible [alcohol] it is" I would ask you why? Why do you think the answer to any problem is to constrain people? I'm not a Big-L libertarian or an anarchist or anything, but in the course of human history we can see that the things that government gets right when they start to control people are pretty few relative to the amount of control they seek.
Well I never mentioned Government as the tool to enact change. I mentioned that we have a cultural problem, our society has an unhealthy relationship with alcohol but there is no Government action capable of dealing with that effectively. Over here Governments keep the lights on and the ship on course. They are not as powerful as perhaps their US counterparts are. Any change to our relationship to alcohol has to come from inside the society, a popular movement or such. This is happening slowly because people see that we have a problem.No, we don't have a problem with guns, we have a problem with violence.
So Guns play no part? I could say we don't a problem with alcohol, we have a problem with alcoholism but that's a cop out. One way to improve the society for everyone is to tackle the problem and make it less acceptable (note: less acceptable, its still legal) to be drunk in the street at 1 in the afternoon.