Baltimore is in the midst of a long-running violence epidemic with no letup in sight. We need a concerted focus from City Hall to the city’s stoops on ending the daily killings, and we need to recognize that what we are doing now isn’t working. Still, that doesn’t mean we should blindly try any idea to stem violence, and the proposal being considered by city officials to test a guns-for-bail scheme is one we should greet with skepticism.

We’ll grant some intuitive appeal to the proposal by Trevor Brooks, a Baltimore native and convicted murderer who turned his life around after leaving prison and is now a budding tech entrepreneur. He has created an app that would allow bail-eligible arrestees to turn over a gun rather than cash to get out of jail pending trial. Once popular, gun buyback programs have largely fallen out of favor because they tend to get guns off the street that would never have been used in crime — whether because they are inoperable or because they belong to people not at risk of violence in the first place.

Mr. Brooks’ idea would give people involved in the criminal justice system an incentive to participate, and he predicts that his plan could get thousands of guns a month out of circulation. His app would allow friends or relatives of a defendant to take a picture of a firearm, and his company would send a box and a lock for safe surrender to authorities. The City Council is considering a resolution backing the idea, and both the Police Department and state’s attorney’s office have reviewed it.

But it raises some serious questions. Would the fact that a defendant has access to a firearm change a judge’s decision about whether he is a safe candidate for pre-trial release? Will turning in a gun put a defendant with prior legal troubles at risk of prosecution for illegal possession of a firearm? The GunBail idea calls for police not to perform tests on the guns to determine whether they have been used in crimes. Can a city struggling to improve its murder clearance rate afford to throw away potential evidence? If you were trying to get rid of a murder weapon, this would be a great way to do it.

We question the institution of cash bail generally, but its ostensible purpose is to give defendants an incentive to show up for trial and to stay out of trouble in the meantime. Either they stand to recover the bail amount or, more commonly, they have a bail bonds company determined to ensure they don’t violate the conditions of their release. Unless the plan is for the police to return the guns after trial — which would seem to defeat the purpose — neither would apply in this case.

And finally, like traditional buy-back programs, this one might well turn up plenty of guns that would never be used in crimes. Family and friends would be in a position of scrounging around to find a gun to turn in just as they are now in a position to pull together cash for bail.

Meanwhile, efforts that have worked in the past to reduce violence are withering. As The Sun’s Luke Broadwater recently reported, the Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice, which in addition to playing a key role in the development of previous crime-fighting strategies oversees programs like Ceasefire, is riddled with vacancies and poised for significant budget cuts. The Safe Streets program, which has a strong track record of preventing violence in the neighborhoods where it operates, is also facing cuts that could all but shut it down. Other strategies and partnerships that pushed the homicide rate to its lowest point in decades just a few years ago died under the previous administration. Meanwhile, city police staffing levels are inadequate, and a new shift system for officers isn’t working as advertised.

We agree with Mayor Catherine Pugh that the ultimate answer to Baltimore’s chronic crime problems is to address their root causes, principally the lack of economic opportunities in many poor city neighborhoods. But we are in a crisis right now. Ms. Pugh said in February that Baltimore’s crime-fighting strategy isn’t working. Since then, the situation has only gotten worse. Still, we don’t need to try desperate experiments, we need to do what we know works.