In videos pouring on to social media from cities across the US, young men are seen brandishing weapons, calling out rivals and firing as people scatter down blocks and around buildings. The point of it all? Gun violence prevention, according to the people involved.

The weapons fire paintballs and participants say it’s a way of settling feuds and disagreements that might otherwise have led to real gunfire.

“In this generation everybody’s fascinated with guns,” said Jarret McClain, a paintballer in Durham, North Carolina. “But if you got paintball guns and you know nobody can get hurt and it won’t cause nobody’s family to cry, at the end of the day it becomes fun shooting at people.”

McClain credits the Atlanta rapper 21 Savage with sparking the recent wave of interest in paintball after he posted a number of videos to social media in early April calling for “guns down, paintballs up” as an alternative to gun violence. McClain said it’s been effective too, and that his crew had already settled three separate vendettas with other groups through paintball.