When we talk about the most violent cities in the nation, we tend to talk about Chicago or New York, and for good reason. Yet there are a lot of other cities that aren’t exactly bastions of peace and harmony. One place that isn’t is Mobile, Alabama.

They’ve recently had a real problem with shootings, like much of the rest of the nation.

Now, police there are hoping a new video will encourage people to put their guns down.

The Mobile Police Department released roughly a minute-long video on Facebook featuring two 11-year-old boys “in the quest to save the lives of their generation from gun violence.”

The one minute, 11 second video is titled “Put the Guns Down” and shows the boys, Jeremiah and Hunter, seemingly walking on a sidewalk after school.

The two boys begin talking about a “shooting that happened yesterday,” and further discuss the problem of gun violence.

“People keep killing each other and it’s like no one even cares. I’m tired of it, I just wish it would stop.”

The other boy responds saying, “Me too, it seems like everyday innocent people are killed just because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes when I walk down the street, I think ‘Am I safe or am I in the wrong place?’

“The solution is so simple,” responds the first boy. “No gun violence in our community means less deaths.”

At the end of the video, an older man named Josh greets the two boys, looks to the camera and says:

“Life is valuable, man. Death is so final, when you pull the trigger, there’s no coming back from that. So please, put the guns down.”

Meanwhile, I’m reading all of this and just stunned at the absolute stupidity of this.

Look, it’s not that anything mentioned in this is untrue. It’s absolutely accurate. However, the idea that this will accomplish literally anything is beyond asinine.

This is what a city does when they literally don’t know what else to do.

No one watches this kind of thing and thinks, “Oh, wow. Those kids are right. So is the old man. I should put down my gun and take up badminton.”

It just doesn’t happen.

Further, it doesn’t dissuade others from going down that road. There’s nothing in this that will stop someone from gangbanging or becoming part of some other violent subculture. Once they’re in that, they aren’t going to really care about anything else.

“But they’re killing our community!”

They. Don’t. Care.

See, in their minds, the community isn’t their community. Their community is their gang, their crew. Those are the people they align with and care about. They don’t typically care about any broader community because that includes people they count as their rivals or enemies.

Unless your video addresses that, and this doesn’t, then don’t expect there to be any change. Nothing is going to be any different from this video, except maybe launching an acting career for one or both of the kids. That’s the absolute best-case scenario here.