Mike McIntire of The New York Times recently reported that “The Guns were said to be destroyed, instead, they were reborn.” They were made new. They were dismantled and deconstructed so they could be put back together again.  There is a company, Gunbusters, that contracts with numerous police departments to destroy their confiscated and turned in firearms. But only kind of.

Split Cross by Scotty Utz

Part of the problem with regulating firearms is the multiple styles of firearms: from handguns to rifles to shotguns, and more. But it’s also the components they are made of. The Gun Control Act of 1968 defines a firearm as the receiver or frame of the firearm.  Its what receives the serial number and what everything else connects to – trigger, stock, barrel, and other mechanisms that when all combined, create what many of us would visually recognize as a gun.

What Gunbusters does, and to their credit, don’t try to hide it, is disassemble all the pieces and parts, and only destroy the receiver or frame, the part with the serial number on it. The rest of the pieces are sold as a kit.  They destroy firearms for free because they can sell the parts to make money. So popular they are, as McIntire reports, that the most popular online site to sell firearms, GunBroker, has frames and receivers for sale referencing which of GunBusters kits can be paired with it to make a functioning firearm. 

Xylophone by youth in Albuquerque

Some of those frames and receivers can be bought without a serial number because they follow the 80% rule. If a frame or receiver is under 80% complete, it doesn’t need a serial number. So toolkits are made to sell a receiver that isn’t fully complete, but can be made complete by a buyer, then paired with a gun kit like those that Gunbusters sells, and be born again.

McIntire tapped into some theological language many of us are familiar with. In fact, the gun industry does this, too. Advertisements that tap into fear and moral superiority that justify pulling a trigger in almost any instance.

J. Warren Cassidy, a former NRA Executive, once said “we should approach the NRA as one of the world’s great religions.” I’d expand that to the gun industry and the culture it has created. 

In McIntire’s article and subsequent segment on NYT’s The Daily, The afterlife of a Gun, has put a stir among municipalities and nonprofits, especially faith communities, who have hosted gun buybacks in partnership with police and have since found out the firearms turned in at their events, were “processed” by GunBusters.

Garden tools and cooking tools made from guns arranged in a peace sign.

All of this is so transactional. Like a “get out of hell” free card.

But there are folks doing this in a more transformative way. RAWtools and their partners have been destroying guns for free.  Except we’re not taking them apart and reselling their parts a-la-carte. We’re making the cuts through the firearm with everything intact.  We’re not just cutting through the receiver and frame, we’re cutting through the trigger assembly, barrel threads, stocks, springs, and other moving parts.  The plastic and soft metal of modern firearms are melting as the cuts are made. The steel of old rifles and shotguns is glowing orange and red as it is destroyed. They are not dismantled, but wholly destroyed as a firearm. And in many cases, folks who have been directly impacted by gun violence, who have lost loved ones, are the ones helping destroy the firearms.  It’s an opportunity, as so many of them tell us, “to physically do something with my hands to make a difference.”  “It’s the healthiest thing I’ve done with the anger of my grief in 30 years,” another told us.

And yet, the destroyed pieces remain. These are what is transformed. Not back into guns, but into a plowshare, or jewelry, or piece of art that begs us to live into another way. Those affected by gun violence participate in this, too. Those affected by the mass trauma of mass shootings are learning how to blacksmith. Retired and bi-vocational clergy who feel need to practice what they’ve preached.

Many of them took part in a forging marathon in June of 2023, laboring one minute for every life lost to gun violence in 2022 – over 44,000. In all, 50,000 minutes were logged by dozens of makers. Much of what they have made is on display at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center in an exhibit, “Another Way is Possible.” Select items from the exhibit are available through auction to support this growing national movement of turning guns into garden tools.

Hawks can become doves.

But its more than the tangible transformation of a sword into a plowshare. It’s also our participation in that process.  To not just heal the elements that make a gun, but to heal our hearts from the trauma we have experienced and the trauma we have caused. Not to create a machine that does this for us, but to accept the invitation to help destroy a firearm or pick up a hammer that beats on the metal from a gun on its way to a plowshare. Because we need to transfer the energy of our pain into a process that transforms that energy into life.

This is how we are reborn. Another way is possible.

After the Sandy Hook massacre, RAWtools formed and traveled the country turning guns into garden tools while centering the voices of those who have lost loved ones to gun violence. We go where we are invited, by word of mouth and relationship. Survivors come to the anvil, pick up a hammer, and beat the Hell out of an object that has caused weeping and gnashing of teeth.

But there is hope at that anvil, too. We discover it doesn’t have to be this way.  We have the power to transform our communities into places that don’t see the gun as a means to solve the problems of our neighborhood. That heaven tells Hell it has no home here and invites life. The hammer shaping the gun barrel into a plowshare that will cultivate life and invite us into a better way. 

I don’t have to travel as much as I did ten years ago.  The RAWtools disarming network has expanded to include blacksmiths all over the country that are now beating guns into garden tools, inviting our loved ones to train for war no more, and cultivating spaces where fear no longer makes decisions for us.  We are building relationships where people welcome each other with open arms instead of bearing arms.

These blacksmiths are joining forces to make beautiful tools, art, and jewelry out of disabled guns. We’re livestreaming every day through June, amassing 44,000+ minutes of Peace – Making. This is one of the things you do when you realize your thoughts and prayers lead to your own action. 

Not only are Blacksmiths joining the effort, but so are individuals who need to do something, like learn how to use a chop saw to cut up a gun. There is a national Guns to Gardens safe surrender movement where churches are being trained how to be a place that disables unwanted firearms and makes space on weekends to offer this service to their communities. 

Because as the older next generation leaves us, we’ll be inheriting millions of firearms. We’ll have an opportunity to exit the cycles of violence.  We can say “Enough,” as Jesus did to Peter in the garden, to a gun culture that no longer cares about a mass shooting short of its benefit to their bottom line. 

We’re called to turn our swords into plowshares because we were taught to pray, “On Earth as it is in Heaven.” 

Every time I talk to a volunteer who is helping us, they always echo the last one I spoke to, “I needed to DO SOMETHING that made a difference.” We hear this from survivors who have picked up the hammer, too, “This experience has helped me heal like others haven’t.” 

The RAWtools 44k Marathon is being livestreamed most days from 8am to 8pm (Central time) most days through the end of June for Gun Violence Prevention Month. Sometimes we start earlier or go a little later. We’re living into Pete Seeger’s and Lee Hays’ words, “If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer in the evening, all over this town. I’d Hammer out danger, I’d hammer out a warning, I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters, ah-ah, All over this land.”

Most of us genuinely want to end gun violence and we want to see it end — that we have in common. Our difference is the means in which we believe is best for all. We do not need to question another’s love for their family if they choose to not have a gun to protect their home, despite the possibility of a break in. We do not need to question another’s love for their family if they choose to own a gun to protect their home despite the possibility it will be used on a loved one instead of an intruder. Our love and care for one another is not in question. How we show that love through protection is in question, and it digs deep into our identity. 

“The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun” is making its rounds on social media. This hero narrative — the only thing that can stop a villain with a gun is a hero with a gun — appeals deeply to our heartstrings and our love for humanity and even more so for those closest to us. Most good guys who do pull the trigger in defense of another do not want the recognition, nor do they really want to shoot anyone. It is a necessary utilitarian task for them, and it’s applied to their homes and their places of worship.

It’s a short-term answer, with long-term ramifications that affect the people beyond our inner circles, including likely trauma or moral injury for the “good guy.” So how do we stop this from continuing to happen? Or more relevant, how do churches and faith communities respond to active shooters and violence?  

What if Jesus didn’t heal the ear of the chief priest’s servant after Peter swung his sword at the servant’s head? Jesus is not questioning Peter’s love for Him when He heals the ear Peter cut off. He is clearly saying this is not the way toward restoration. Jesus is showing us short-term violence never leads to long-term peace. Jesus is foreshadowing where the hero moment belongs. It looks more like a cross than a weapon on the hip. It looks more like the students at many high schools who rush and tackle a shooter, often at the expense of their own life. It looks like the six staff of Sandy Hook Elementary losing their lives so their students keep theirs.“ Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for others,” Jesus told the disciples.  

Isaiah 53 foretells that Jesus will be seen with the transgressors at his arrest. Peter left no doubt he, and by extension the disciples, were seen as transgressors by Peter becoming violent. “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a sword is a disciple with a sword.” This is what we are saying when we decide to arm our ushers. We must ask ourselves why we are so preoccupied with preparing to be a transgressor in our show of love for those around us? Do we not trust the resurrection?

After the El Paso shooting earlier this year, data for gun violence in Texas went mainstream. Every three hours a person dies by firearm in Texas, an average of 3,139 per year from 2013 to 2017. Firearm death is on the increase in Texas, despite good guys with guns. It’s a state that prides itself on gun rights and gives legs to the hero narrative of a “good guy with a gun.” This narrative is driven by the NRA machine and recited at every NRA convention by many of its keynote speakers, including people of faith. 

We must choose which narrative we want to give legs to: the way of the Lord or the way of the transgressors? Previous Executive Vice President J. Warren Cassidy once remarked, “You would get a far better understanding of the NRA if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world.”  

Do we want to sound more like the NRA or more like Jesus?

Rev. Sharon Risher lost her mom, cousin, and two friends in the Emmanuel AME church shooting. This past summer, Shane Claiborne and I held a Beating Guns event with Rev. Risher and she shared her story. She then walked to the anvil and swung a hammer to beat on the barrel of a gun in memory of her loved ones. She called out their names with each swing. Her loved ones were about to pray when the shooter entered. They invited him to pray with them. He opened fire after the prayer, killing nine saints. The moment Rev. Risher started hitting on the barrel of the gun was a hero moment that echoed the loss of the Emmanuel 9. It was a moment of transforming death into life.

The passages of Isaiah and Micah that call us to beat our swords into plowshares end by calling us to walk in the way of the Lord. This is not a call for something to do far off in the future; this is a call to act like the Lord now — on earth as it is in heaven. When we see people walking in the way of the Lord, we must recognize them as heroes. Rev. Risher is a hero for all of us and has a clear belief about the narrative she wants to lift up:

“I wholly believe guns have no place in a church. The narrative about a good guy with a gun is what politicians feed the public to make their point for arming people. The NRA will use anything to make their point and sell more guns.

If you truly believe in Jesus, you won’t carry that gun to church.”

We’ll be with Rev. Risher again in North Carolina on January 11th. May we beat our guns into garden tools. May we mourn with those who have lost loved ones to gun violence. May our places of worship look more like Jesus and less like the NRA.

May we have ears to hear each other — not swords to cut them off.  

We started RAWtools two months after the shooting to approach the issue from a different angle. By turning swords into plowshares and guns into garden tools, we’re advocating for an altogether different approach to violence in our country. An approach that elevates the Sermon on the Mount over the 2nd Amendment. An approach that adds action to “thoughts and prayers.” Or put another way, our thoughts and prayers compel action.

READ: Sandy Hook and the Tearing Asunder of Evangelical Christianity

The #HonorWithAction campaign was started by the Newtown Action Alliance in 2014, two years after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting took the lives of 20 six- and seven-year-old children and six educators.

The #HonorWithAction campaign compels us to look at all of our options to take action to end gun violence. When the campaign launched, Marie Morosky, then in third grade said, “I miss my friends who were killed on December 14th,” as Morosky wore a green sweater, the color that’s come to be symbolic of Sandy Hook. “I honor their memories with action.”

In 2016, a Portland, OR, softball team was raffling an AR-15 (similar to the Bushmaster used at Sandy Hook) to raise money for a tournament trip. Unnerved, local Episcopalian pastor Rev. Jeremy Lucas sprang into action and used ministry funds to buy half of the raffle tickets for the sole purpose of destroying the gun if we won. And he did.

Because Rev. Lucas took action, along with his prayers, he was invited to The Newtown Foundation’s annual vigil, where he gifted the tool.

This is why we are going to New Haven, Conn., in 2018.

Next year, RAWtools will be training inmates at the New Haven Correctional Center in partnership with the Newtown Foundation, Newtown Action Alliance, New Haven Police Department, and artist Gar Waterman, to forge guns into garden tools to be used in local community gardens.

After the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Steve Yanovsky of Newtown Action Alliance began to dream big. He helped organize gun buybacks, then connected with police and the correctional center. His efforts have expanded “farm-to-table” to “gun-to-garden-tool-to-farm-to-table.”

If any of the food grown from these tools makes it back to the correctional facility, a beautiful circle has been created. A circle that looks entirely different than the victim-offender cycle.

“Read with a child, volunteer at a food bank, put some money in the meter for the next person who’s holiday shopping,” said Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D – 5th District of CT). “Take some time to reach out and help someone else.”

Take action long before it escalates to gun violence. Christmas is coming — be Emmanuel in your community. Together, we can end gun violence.

This article was adapted from RAWtools.

This past summer, as the NRA rallied enthusiasts with the specter of a Cinton-led assault on 2nd Amendment rights,   Rev Jeremy Lucas pooled money to buy raffle tickets for an AR-15.

A local softball team in Portland, OR was raffling the gun to raise money for a team trip. Rev. Lucas bought half the tickets and won the AR-15. Spending $3, 000, Rev. Lucas said, “this gun will never be used to kill kids in schools, kill people in a movie theater, kill people at an office party or at any other place of mass shootings. This gun will never be found by a child who accidently shoots a friend. … It will never be stolen and used to commit a crime or used to threaten a family in a domestic violence situation. If I had the chance for $3, 000 to keep any of these things from happening — even one time — I’d do it again in a second.”

But what do you do with an AR-15 that you never want to hurt anyone?

Rev. Lucas teamed up with RAWtools to beat his modern-day sword into a plowshare. We decided to make it into a garden hoe.

For Rev. Lucas,  it was a small symbolic act that points communities toward a way of peace and nonviolence. Rev. Lucas has been invited to attend the Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath, which begins in Washington, D.C. today. There he will give the tool made from the AR-15 to the Newtown Action Alliance, founded by the community of Newtown, CT after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school. Nearly four years ago, this shooting prompted the beginning of RAWtools. We are honored to, in some small way, give something back to that community.

We cannot fall asleep on gun violence in our country. While mass shootings make the headlines far too often, they are a window into the 91 lives lost everyday to gun violence in our communities. Suicide, toddler shootings, domestic violence, road rage, police shootings, hate crimes and acts of terrorism are all ways that gun violence cries out to us each day.

We must create safe space and provide resources for our communities to deal with our pain. This is the work of turning swords into plowshares. This is why Rev. Lucas needed to get the AR-15 and have it made into a garden tool. We must work together to plant the seeds that build neighborhoods and help us take care of each other rather than being on constant defense. We have a gun and a heart problem–and we all need to be disarmed.

I think Rev. Lucas says it well, “I really want people to know that this is a symbolic act meant to wake people from their complacency from what we have come to expect as normal. We are normalizing gun violence in ways we have never done before. We accept active shooter drills in elementary schools as normal now! Why? In this season of Advent we need to keep awake, as we prepare for the coming of the Prince of Peace we must become that peace.”

Beating swords into plowshares is a new spiritual discipline required to refocus our imagination and our hearts to become the peace Rev. Lucas is asking us to be. We can follow the Prince of Peace toward a less violent world. This Advent season, may we all find the courage to turn the swords of our life into plowshares.

Prophets and artists laid the ground work for this to take place. On Sunday at St. Thomas we sang the hymn “Blessed Martin, Pastor, Prophet” in honor of Dr. King, himself a victim on gun violence. Dr. King, perhaps the greatest contemporary prophet, paved roads marked with nonviolent activism that dared to dream and imagine a world of mutual respect between races and religions, neighborhoods and nations. And it was Esther Augsberger who commissioned a large plowshare made from guns from the Washington D.C. area. Many artists have been a part of weapons transformations into art, tools, instruments, and restorative justice mediation talking pieces.

Without these prophets and artists, and others like them, we have no way to see through the darkness. As the prophet Dr. King said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” And so as these artists and prophets shine light into the darkness, it is up to us to follow the path they have illuminated.

Gun violence takes on many forms and speaks from many conflicts. Suicide accounts for over half of the gun violence and handguns are a major part of urban violence. It is a complex issue, but as you can see in the video, it takes community to intervene and care for each other. Did you know that after a suicide, many times the weapon is returned to the family as required by property law? At RAWtools, we have received a few of these as they have weighed heavy and unused by the family in the time since the loss of their loved one. They are not inanimate, but became something else-something of a negative and often drowning sentiment.

At the MLK interfaith program, Shane Claiborne proclaimed that we do not need to wait for our governments to take action. This surely is in line with the action of Dr. King, whose actions were the seed and motivation for many policy and constitutional change.

As Shane says, “The new world the prophets of old told us about begins with us.  It begins with you.  We are the ones that we have been waiting on. A movement has begun.  We are beating guns into shovels and tanks into tractors.  We are going to interrupt the patterns of death, and war and gun violence. So send us your weapons and we’ll send you back a tool for the garden.  Or better yet, take a welding lesson from a welder near you.  And send us the pictures. It’s time to beat some swords into plows.”

May it be as the song, Blessed Martin says,

“Teacher of Christ-like nonviolence, To the outcast, poor and meek.

Greater weapon ‘gainst oppression, is to turn the other cheek.

Preacher of Christ’s love for neighbor, he won Nobel’s prize for peace.

Peoples, beat your swords to plowshares, Wars ‘twixt nations all shall cease.”

The recent movie Noah (2014) casts Tubal-Cain as the antagonist, organizing an army to take the Ark. Genesis 4:22 states he was “the forger of all implements of bronze and iron.” Josephus regarded Tubal-Cain as, “[exceeding] all men in strength, and was [an] expert and famous in martial performances, … and first of all invented the art of working brass.”

What would it look like if we used the skills of Tubal-Cain, a metal smith, and fashioned them with the moral imagination of Jesus?

Instead of making implements of war, RAWtools make implements of agriculture. Instead of swords we make plowshares, echoing the Old Testament prophets.

RAWtools is not waiting for the next mass shooting or stray bullet from a gang initiation to heed the prophets’ call. We’re learning now what it means to “study war no more.”

After we started RAWtools, several gun laws were passed here in Colorado. These laws dealt primarily with background checks and magazine capacities. While we cheer each step in the right direction, we also hear a call to do more than stand back and wait for the State to act. Churches and community organizations can work to be places where guns are disabled and traded for nonviolent educational resources now.

This is the ground RAWtools is preparing to cultivate. And we’re organizing a national network to do so.

Police departments are already scrapping confiscated weapons. Why not recycle this deficit into a surplus and tangible benefit for our communities? What if former weapons of war supported Restorative Justice Mediator training? What if we could provide temporary work for the homeless? What if we tracked the tools made from each gun and tallied the pounds of food we grew and the flowers we spread, forging peaceful narratives across our communities?

This is possible. It has already begun. Here are the words of a gardener who used one of our tools this past summer;

The RAWtools hand-pick I have been using to work my garden plot was once [as a gun] an instrument of death. Now, it has been transformed into an instrument of community relationship, spiritual growth, and patience. In my hands, the tool helps reconcile garden problems rather than exacerbate sinful problems. Sharing my experience with RAWtools and gardening with friends and family has opened up meaningful dialogue. Sharing strawberries from my plot with my apartment community has strengthened ties. Carrots from my plot went into the salad of a man suffering stage 4 cancer. In the words of a neighbor: “This strawberry of peace might be the best thing I’ve ever tasted!” There is leadership in restraint, and there is food in my garden. This is a reality the gun never offered.

In a blacksmith glossary you will find words like Wainwright, Wheelwright, and Cartwright. A “wright” is defined as one who works with metal and wood.

We have heard a call to become Peacewrights. From artistic expression to practical application, it is time for a cultural shift in our moral imaginations. It is time to reimagine the Tubal-Cain that dominates our culture and wage peace in the good world that God has redeemed.