[Hello Kitty]

Maybe institute a temporary rule where after a certian number of warns, the gags start, and after a certian number of gags, they are banned for maybe 10 minutes, ramping up to an hour, and then day bans from there, resetting the process the next day (giving people who had a bad day some leeway)?

This is already the rule. The problem isn't that the rules aren't strict enough, the problem is they're not being enforced properly.

Honestly. IMO I believe staff have the issue/concern of when to actually utilize the command.  Abuse of commands can lead to issues such as demotion. In addition, within the server there is many trolls and they're constantly growing at an annoying rate.