The federal government spends a lot of money on some pretty stupid stuff. We knew that well before DOGE initiated its rampage through the federal bureaucracy. USAID alone spent an insane amount on things that we really had no business funding in the first place. It was just stupid.

I'd like to say something about how in a perfect world, we'd only finance X, but the truth is that everyone has different views of what the federal government should finance. I tend to take a view that involves the absolute minimum being funded. Others prefer a bit more. That's fine.

But with the current freeze on federal funds going anywhere, some programs may be cut off that some believe help reduce violent crime.

Today, Green works with Morgan as the program manager for AIM, a hospital-linked violence intervention program launched in 2010 as a partnership between Denver Health and the nonprofit Denver Youth Program. It since has expanded to include Children’s Hospital Colorado and the University of Colorado Hospital.

AIM is one of dozens of hospital-linked violence intervention programs around the country. The programs aim to uncover the social and economic factors that contributed to someone ending up in the ER with a bullet wound: inadequate housing, job loss, or feeling unsafe in one’s neighborhood, for example.

Such programs that take a public health approach to stopping gun violence have had success — one in San Francisco reported a fourfold reduction in violent injury recidivism rates over six years. But President Donald Trump’s executive orders calling for the review of the Biden administration’s gun policies and trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans have created uncertainty around the programs’ long-term federal funding. Some organizers believe their programs will be just fine, but others are looking to shore up alternative funding sources.

“We’ve been worried about, if a domino does fall, how is it going to impact us? There’s a lot of unknowns,” said John Torres, associate director for Youth Alive, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit.

Federal data shows that gun violence became a leading cause of death among children and young adults at the start of this decade and was tied to more than 48,000 deaths among people of all ages in 2022. New York-based pediatric trauma surgeon Chethan Sathya, a National Institutes of Health-funded firearms injury prevention researcher, believes those statistics show that gun violence can’t be ignored as a health care issue. “It’s killing so many people,” Sathya said.

Research shows that a violent injury puts someone at heightened risk for future ones, and the risk of death goes up significantly by the third violent injury, according to a 2006 study published in The Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection and Critical Care.

Now, I'm harsh on researchers who treat so-called gun violence as a "public health crisis" or anything else akin to treating it like a disease. That's because they almost always focus on the gun, not the people.

Yet the kind of programs being talked about here seem to actually do just that.

See, what happens in a lot of cases is that when someone gets shot, they don't just slink off. They want retaliation. This is the result of our inner cities basically being honor cultures, where losing face is seen as worse than losing one's life. Getting shot requires a response.

The programs in question involve things like counseling to deter that. They talk to people and try to convince them that retaliation isn't the way to handle this. If they listen, they don't go out and shoot someone else. If the counselor does the job really well, they also won't seek retaliation when someone else gets shot.

In other words, it focuses on the people and why they commit acts of violence, rather than just trying to ban guns.

Because of that, I'm sympathetic to their plight. While the results are correlation, which doesn't necessarily mean causation, this does seem to be a trend in most places that have similar efforts underway, from what I've seen. I'm willing to accept that it works as advertised, in part because it just makes sense.

However, there's also a case to be made about why the rest of the nation has to fund an effort in the Bay Area of California. Why can't the state fund it, or the local government? Why is the onus on the rest of us when we all have our own issues to be addressed?

Those are the questions that aren't necessarily being asked, and I'm not going to try to answer them here. It's not what we do here, but it's a worthy discussion to have just the same.