Paying People Not to Shoot Each Other

…is on the table in California.
My first (and pretty much only) question is, “Does it work?” If not, then bag it. If so, seems like money well spent to me. I’m told (when the subject is not gun violence and poor people) that people are rational actors when it comes to money and that is why the sacred Invisible Hand of the Market will always create good and never result in evil. If people are as rational as all that, it seems to me that they would prefer the $$$ over shooting each other. So it seems worth a try if you buy that (I’m not sure I do buy the whole “rational actor” what with sin making people stupid, but it’s still worth a shot, it seems to me). However, I suspect that not a few people’s first response is “Human life is less important than my tax money” or, “The shiftless poor need to learn from the hard experience of being shot to death how to pull themselves up and work for a living” or the related sentiment “If the poor be like to shoot each other, they had better do it and help decrease the surplus population”. I’m happy to have my taxes go to save people from abortion. I’m also happy to let it go to saving them from being shot, if it works. Cuz gun violence is a prolife issue.