University of Michigan Finds ‘Gun Violence’ Prevention Program Works

Despite the rhetoric from anti-gunners, we pro-Second Amendment types aren’t interested in seeing violent crime rates do anything but plummet, if for no other reason than it’s harder to make the case for gun control. It’s not the only reason, obviously, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

No, many of us, including myself, have advocated for non-gun control interventions. We need to understand violent crime and precisely why it happens, then address those causes.

According to the University of Michigan, a program in Detroit did just that.

An analysis by the University of Michigan shows a sharp drop in Detroit gun violence connected to a violence prevention program.

ShotStoppers is an intervention program that empowers community members who have lived with gun violence to reduce such incidents in their own neighborhoods.

According to a study by U-M’s Poverty Solutions initiative, homicides and nonfatal shootings have dropped 45% over the past three years in areas where the program is taking place.

That’s pretty good. At least, it’s pretty good if the program holds up. The question is, will it?

The gist of the program is:

The City of Detroit’s ShotStoppers Community Violence Intervention (CVI) program began in 2023 and provides ongoing and performance-based grants to community-based organizations focused on reducing gun violence. Community violence intervention is a community-centered, non-law enforcement approach that empowers community members to disrupt violence within their neighborhoods. The City’s ShotStoppers program is part of a larger movement towards municipal involvement in CVI programs. KEY FINDINGS SEPTEMBER 2026

The CVI zones assigned to each team experienced decreases in homicides and non-fatal shootings from 2023 to 2025, with some areas outpacing the parts of the city not covered by the program. The ShotStoppers program funds selected community-based organizations, known as CVI teams, to develop and implement programs and activities to address violence in specific geographically defined “CVI zones,” 3- to 5-square-mile areas of Detroit that have historically experienced high levels of gun violence. Teams work to reduce the number of homicides and non-fatal shootings in their respective designated zones using intervention strategies that they believe address persistent violence in the zone. The City coordinates shooting incident responses between the teams and the local police precincts and provides annual base funding to each CVI team to support its efforts; teams earn quarterly performance-based bonuses when their zones experience decreasing homicide and nonfatal shooting victimizations at a higher rate than the citywide average.

So what did they do? What are the interventions?

It started by first connecting with “shooters,” as one of the individuals involved in ground-level work put it. The argument is simple: violent people run in the same circles, just like how nurses know other nurses, woodworkers know other woodworkers, and people who play basketball know other people who play basketball. There’s a kind of network, and once the people on the ground get one of the “shooters,” they have access to the whole network.

From there:

These teams often hired full-time staff with local connections. Teams paired short-term intervention strategies, like conflict resolution and mentorship, with long-term supports like formal peer cohorts, workforce skill development, and food and housing assistance. 

Teams focused on community engagement, specifically New Era, forged a distinctly different strategy. Their approach centered around activating communities through mobile block parties and holding resource fairs in disinvested areas dealing with high levels of violence. As a team leader explained it:

“[T]hat’s really what our organization is based on: engagement, being able to build relationships and relate to people in a way that makes people feel comfortable and then also get valuable resources to people. Which is why we’re always pushing for as many resources as we possibly can, and why this program works out so great, because now we do have an opportunity with a level of funding to get the certain resources that we might not have been able to obtain before. Now we have that option of doing that. So the program just helps put gas in the vehicle that we already have.“

In other words, it looks like they took a two-pronged approach, focusing both on those who were likely to get involved in shootings in the first place but also the communities around them, creating a potential disincentive that might not have been that strong before.

However, the question is whether the program actually accomplished anything, since there are other communities that showed a similar, if not better, drop over the last three years. However, as noted above, there’s a built-in control, namely parts of Detroit not covered by these CVI zones. That helps, but it’s not a perfect control.

Still, on the national scale, we’ve only seen a drop of about 30 percent in the homicide rate, compared to the 45 percent reported in the study.

Look, if it works, I’m all for it. It’s not gun control. It’s an assault on the causes of violent crime, and if it works, it’s worth every penny being spent on it. Not only does it save lives and untold suffering, but it undercuts the anti-gun argument that the answer to this kind of thing is gun control. It’s not. It’s not in the least.

It’s about people. It’s always been about people.

Remove the guns and violent people will still be violent people.

Take away the underlying cause of the violence in the first place, and it doesn’t matter if we have publicly accessible rocket launchers.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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