Gadianton Robbers

A few months ago I was in church and we were discussing the Book of Mormon. We talked about the Gadianton Robbers and then the teacher asked about what Gadianton Robbers could be in our day and how to avoid/ overcome them. She said that gossip could be a Gadianton Robber and turned the whole discussion in that direction. This really annoyed me. I hate it when we take something in the scriptures and change it (supposedly to relate it to us) far beyond its meaning. In this case we ignored the very real modern day examples of Gadianton Robbers so we could talk about gossip (and other unrelated topics).
Let me explain what the obvious and relatable modern day Gadianton Robbers are. Gangs, terrorists, the mafia, drug lords and smugglers, political assasins.... I could go on. It seems to me that you could compile this list and then say, "What does the Book of Mormon teach us about how we can overcome gangs in our community". This is great because it is relatable and a real threat to us in the same way the Gadianton Robbers were for the Nephites. Gangs cause huge problems in modern society, operate in secret, work against laws, and can cause our destruction. Because of this the solutions found in the Book of Mormon will have some resemblence to the solutions to the gang problem. It is the same for terrorists or organized crime - both very real problems in much of our current world and both extreemely similar to Gadianton Robbers.
My point is that when we discuss the gospel and try to relate it to us we shouldn't decide that we want to talk about something else and just say that the subject doesn't directly apply to us and change it to something else we want to talk to. Let's find the actual modern day meanings and learn what we are supposed to! Let me give you an example. The Bible uses the word "sorceries". Today we might be inclined to say that we don't have magic etc. so any discussion of sorceries as used in the Bible is irrelevant (outside of places like Africa where people still believe in magic). But the Book of Mormon mentions sorceries twice and it was written for our day. So what are modern day sorceries? An institute teacher told me the Greek word translated as sorceries is "pharma" (or at least it comes from that). That is the same root as the word "pharmaceuticals" or drugs. It could be that sorcerers are potion makers and that potions aren't really magical but substances that make you hallucinate and get high, drugs. If we can see the modern parallel then we can see how to avoid it. If we try to say that sorceries are, lets say, not reading the scriptures, then we will completely miss what we were supposed to learn, avoid, do, whatever.
This post has been hastily written and is probably choppy, but I think the content is true. Let's find the real meanings of things so we can deal with them.