(upbeat music) - You can't believe it's been 16 years.

This will be the 16th annual Silence the Violence march.

This year, well, last year it had grown so large that other people came and said, "Hey, we need to be doing this in our city."

So we're going to be doing it in other cities across the state of Michigan.

So it's going to be in Ann Arbor, Grand Haven, Flint, Kalamazoo, Oxford, Southfield, and Pontiac.

And so there will be other cities joining us honoring the innocent victims of gun violence.

Some will hold marches, some will have prayer rallies, some will be doing sitting-ins.

And in Southfield there'll be a gun buyback.

So they're gonna be different across the state of Michigan, but it's expanding.

Last year, about a thousand people show up.

This year we expect between two and 3,000 people.

- So I wanna give you a chance just to talk a little about what's going on.

This is a strange time in the city for violence.

We've gotten through the pandemic, the awfulness of the pandemic.

Everybody, all of us had to kind of relearn how to function in the world, I feel like, after all the loss and disruption of that.

And we come out of it to what seems to be shaping up as an era of increasing violence in the city.

it's not safer, it's worse.

You see it up close with young people, you see it in the community there at the church.

What do you think is going on?

Why is this happening?

- Well, Steven that is a great question, and one of the things that I think about is now in 2023, is our leading cause of death among young people or children under the age of 17 is guns.

Something a hundred percent preventable.

This issue is not all across the world.

It is a unique American way of dying, and I think that's something that we need to look at.

It used to be accidents or illness, and now it's guns.

This is something that we can do something about.

And I always have to tell people, this has nothing to do with your Second Amendment rights being able to carry a firearm.

This is about getting it out of the hands of people who shouldn't have one.

People who don't believe in just carrying a firearm to protect themselves, but who are planning on committing murder.

That's really the issue that we're trying to get down to.

That's why we're trying to silence that violence.

But this is unique across the country.

It's not just Detroit, it's everywhere.

And firearms, there's an easy access to it, and there's a lot of people who shouldn't have it who have it, and they're taking their anger and frustration out on other people.

So times have changed.

- Yeah, I know you do a lotta work reaching out to young people in your community.

Talk about the things that we need to be doing to divert them from this kinda thing.

Obviously marches like Silence the Violence are really important, but you work all year on this issue.

- Yeah, and what I'd like to tell people too 'cause people come and say, "Well, Pastor Barry, marches don't stop gun violence."

The march is not to stop gun violence.

The march is to remember those who died because of gun violence.

So we walk around with signs and picture of those.

So we wanna remember them and we wanna honor them by creating hopefully more peaceful communities, more cohesive, strong communities.

I'll let the young people know that I'm 60 years old.

So Steven, I'm older than you and I remember a time when gun violence was not the leading cause of death, there was no such word as carjacking or drive-bys, no such words as mass shootings.

You didn't hear about this.

That wasn't that long ago.

So there was a time when this was not as big of an issue as it is now.

So it's not like we've never not had a time when gun violence was not a major issue in this country.

So we know that that can exist, and we know that that can happen, and what we're trying to do is make sure that happens.

What we need to do is to build our communities and neighborhood.

We need to have more affordable housing, we need to have job training, we need to work on business incubation, We need to work on education and skilled trades to make sure that our young people have a good, positive, strong future, and we need to teach them their value.

The value of who they are as a human being more than outward material sense.

- Yeah, the march, people, anyone can participate obviously, but I wanted you to talk just a little more about the things that you have seen about, you know, changing the sense of community around this issue from the march.

You were just talking about people saying, well, marches don't solve crimes or marches don't stop people from shooting each other.

But you are building a real sense of community around how we think about this issue, how we deal with this issue.

Talk about over the 16 years how that's changed.

- Well, I can tell you our very first march, we had 58 people and it was specifically for the community of Island View because we had a couple of unfortunate murders of young people, and we decided we were not just gonna sit back and let them be statistics.

We were going to do something.

So we created an organization to help fight crime and build community.

So it was about doing that specifically for Island View.

Then within a couple years, it became a citywide event, and then lately, it became a statewide event and so it was about bringing the resources directly to the community to those who are the most vulnerable.

And one of the things that I'm proud of over the years is that so many groups and organization that work on gun violence intervention are part of what we do every year.

So the people who do the boots on the groundwork, the people who work with the ones with the guns, the people who work in dangerous communities in the neighborhood, they come and they participate.