An AK-47 transforms into a plow. Or an AR-15 turns into a spade. Gun barrels become mattocks, hoes and trowels. These garden tools will be sold to buy more guns by Guns to Gardens, a buyback program dedicated to creating a cycle of awareness around gun violence.
New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence (NMPGV), which hosts the program, is a nonprofit that works to reduce gun violence. The program started about two and a half years ago and was modeled off of a similar program called RAWtools. Guns to Gardens allows gun owners to anonymously turn in their weapons and receive gift cards in return. But the gun’s life doesn’t stop there. The guns are dismantled and brought to an artist, who reshapes them into gardening tools.
A program like this especially important in a state like New Mexico, which has higher firearm mortality rates than the country’s average — a rate that has increased nearly twice as fast in New Mexico than in the rest of the country.
NMPGV has hosted seven gun buybacks in the past two years and has collected over 400 guns.
To learn more about Guns to Gardens, watch the above video.
Tag: Guns
New Mexico Is Awash in Guns. This Program Offers a Solution
Tiago Renê Torres Da Silva leaves details in every tool he forges. Details that have stories. Silva, a blacksmith by trade, takes disarmed guns and turns them into garden tools.
Maybe the detail is a scratch on the barrel or a front sight that will be incorporated into the garden tool he’ll soon reshape.
“You want them to know it [once] was a gun,” he said.
Silva might not know who the gun belonged to or the story behind it, but he knows the pain from gun violence. Growing up in a small town in Brazil, Silva had friends die by gunfire. “There’s a lot of things that happened with guns there that I don’t like,” he said.
Silva emigrated to the States in 2016, but he hardly left gun culture behind. That’s because he now lives in New Mexico, where gun ownership clocks in at about 50 percent, compared to the national average of 30 percent.
So it makes sense that New Mexico has higher firearm mortality rates than the country’s average — a rate that has increased nearly twice as fast in New Mexico than in the rest of the country. For Silva, speaking of his life in Brazil, “only the police and bad guys have guns.” But in New Mexico, “it feels like everyone has a gun.”
Silva now works for New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence (NMPGV), a nonprofit that works to reduce gun violence through programming and training. One program, called Guns to Gardens, buys back guns and transforms them into gardening tools.
“We take better care of our guns than our people here,” said Miranda Viscoli, the co-president of NMPGV.
About two and a half years ago, Viscoli was brainstorming with a friend, and they came up with Guns to Gardens, modeled off of a similar program called RAWtools, which we recently reported on. Guns to Gardens is a buyback program where gun owners anonymously turn in their weapons and receive gift cards in return.
After rates of gun violence spiked across the nation in the mid-1990s, nonprofits, police departments and communities turned to buyback programs in an attempt to lessen gun violence.
Research shows that buybacks might not be the best solution to ending gun violence. In general, households that participated in buybacks still retained ownership of at least one gun and the guns collected are usually the least likely to be used in crimes.
Sabrina Arredondo Mattson, a research associate at the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, said although buybacks are ineffective when it comes to lowering violence, there may be potential for buybacks to raise awareness.
“It depends on what your goal is, if the goal is to build awareness, then that may be working,” Arredondo Mattson said. “If the goal and what you’re trying to do is reduce youth gun violence, that’s not an effective approach.”
Viscoli said she kept hearing similar criticisms, but when she saw pictures of a gun buyback in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and saw how many assault weapons and automatic handguns were turned in, she said, “We will do gun buybacks.”
Viscoli said a third of the weapons they receive are semiautomatic handguns and assault weapons, which are the most common guns used in crimes.
Buybacks paired with other NMPGV initiatives, like student pledge campaigns and public education, can have an impact. Gun buybacks might remove only a small percentage of a community’s weapons, but it provides a way for people to take action while showing support for victims, and also raise awareness of issues around gun violence.
Arredondo Mattson agreed that gun buybacks may work as supplemental programming. “Combined with other strategies that are aimed at and have been shown to reduce gun violence then it might be a good add on.” But she stressed that evidence-based prevention programs are the most successful strategy to lower violence.
The difference between NMPGV’s program and a typical buyback is that the gun’s life doesn’t stop there. The guns are dismantled and brought to Silva, who reshapes them into gardening tools. The money from the garden tools is used to purchase more gift cards for buybacks.
Which propels the cycle of awareness. NMPGV hosted seven gun buybacks in the past two years and collected over 400 guns.
“We see firsthand that these are objects that people really don’t want in their home, people don’t feel safe with them anymore,” Viscoli said. “And this gives them the opportunity to get rid of them.”
Viscoli said a majority of the guns are from parents who don’t want a gun in the house, widows who have no idea what to do with their partner’s guns and families with members who have suicidal thoughts or dementia. About 95 percent have brought guns in because of safety issues, Viscoli said.
“There’s a sense of relief on their face,” she said. “They’re so grateful we can take these guns.”
More: From Fatal Shots to Garden Plots: These Guns Are Given New Meaning
From Fatal Shots to Garden Plots: These Guns Are Given New Meaning
The gun that killed Tom Miller sat locked in an antique chest for 47 years, stashed underneath police reports, crime photos and autopsy documents from the homicide case.
“It’s the sort of thing where you know it’s there… but you don’t know what to do with it,” Stephen Miller, Tom’s brother, told NationSwell.
The gun lay undisturbed for nearly five decades — out of sight, but never really out of mind — until Miller, now 62, cleaned out his childhood home. And with his mother focused on her transition into an assisted living center, it fell to Miller to decide what to do with it.
In the United States, there are limited options to dispose of unwanted firearms. Some police departments host gun buybacks, where people can bring weapons in exchange for cash. Other police departments will always accept people’s guns, no questions asked. But Miller didn’t necessarily want to give the gun away, despite the tragedy it brought into his family’s life. He suspected the weapon might find greater purpose beyond the reason it was built.
“I still want to have that connection to what happened,” he said. “But I want it to be turned towards positive action.”
And so, rather than dispose of the weapon through a police-sponsored program, Miller found his way to RAWtools, a faith-based gun nonviolence nonprofit that helps families like his recycle unwanted firearms. With their help, the gun that killed Tom Miller — a gun that brought so much anguish into the lives of Stephen and his family — will help something beautiful bloom. Literally.
Swords to Plowshares, the RAWtools program working to repurpose Miller’s weapon, draws its name from a notable verse from the Old Testament that says world peace is only possible when weapons are transformed into farming tools. Inspired by that passage, Swords to Plowshares breaks down unwanted guns and turns them into garden tools. It’s seen AR-15s become spades, AK-47s morph into plows and gun barrels experience new life as mattocks, hoes and trowels.
Mike Martin, executive director of the organization, cited the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 as the reason he took action to help end gun violence.
“It feels productive to be able to take something that was designed to take life and turn it into something that can give life,” Martin said of Swords to Plowshares’ methods.
In the United States, white Christians have one of the highest rates of gun ownership. Forty-one percent of white evangelicals and 33 percent of white protestant mainliners reported owning a gun, compared to the national gun ownership average of 30 percent. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans claim safety as the number one reason for gun ownership. But in October 2017, Scientific American cited dozens of studies that show the exact opposite is true: more guns actually lead to more violent crime, not less.
Martin, a former pastor, said he’s not there to judge his fellow Christians — rather, he hopes to use his organization to start a conversation that might change the narrative on gun ownership.
“It’s hard to carry a gun in one hand and a cross in the other,” he told NationSwell. “So we ask questions and we have a meaningful dialogue about that.”
Martin’s organization hosts events where gun violence survivors and allies meet in church parking lots to repurpose former weapons. As guns are sawed, metal sparks; so do conversations. People of all faiths — or no faith at all — are welcome to take part.
Here’s what those participating may see: a human whose life was impacted by gun violence speaks to their experience while a donated gun is disarmed. The weapon is heated thousands of degrees until the metal glows, signaling that it’s hot enough to reshape. Anyone impacted by gun violence can take a turn hitting the heated gun barrel against an anvil to begin its reshaping process.
A mother might strike the weapon 18 times to remember her 18-year-old child who died from suicide. Or a student might hit it in memory of a lost friend and classmate. Most recently, the barrel was struck in memory of the at least 50 victims who lost their lives in the March mass shooting at Christchurch in New Zealand.
After this shared ritual, the metal will be reforged into garden tools. Some of those tools end up in the homes of people who donated guns. Others will find their way to community gardens. The rest are sold to support RAWtools’ mission, with some of the proceeds helping the organization expand its outreach and create a national disarming network where people can bring a gun to be disarmed and donated.
“There’s a lot of grief, but there’s also something that happens at the anvil that pivots it towards hope,” Martin said. “We know that there’s a way out of it.”
For people who have experienced emotional and spiritual pain, there is powerful alchemy in welding together the symbolic and the literal. Though the organization doesn’t always do this, RAWTools set aside some of the pieces of the gun that killed Tom Miller to be reforged into a cross, a holy symbol from Miller’s faith emblematic of the church, the divine and the possibility of hope and healing from death.
Unlike the gun, that cross won’t be locked away for decades. Miller said he plans to carry it with him everywhere he goes.
More: 4 Low-Lift Ways You Can Help Fight Gun Violence
Packing the Substitute Teacher Pool With Outside Experts, Charging Cars By the Mile (Not By the Gallon) and More
What Can Substitute Teachers Do for City Schools? CityLab
The average teacher misses 9.4 days each school year. Total it up, and by high school graduation, a student will have spent six months of class-time with a substitute teacher. Rather than having a sub plod through an unfamiliar lesson plan or just distribute worksheets, a new model at two Boston schools places local experts in urban farming, animation, robotics, puppetry — you name it — at the blackboard to teach about their field.
Taxing Drivers by the Mile, Instead of at the Pump, The Denver Post
Hybrid and electric vehicles may be a boon to the atmosphere, but they’ve caused some headaches for government administrators, namely, how to pay for bridge and road repairs. Prius drivers travel farther on a tank — functionally discounting their share of the gas tax — so the Colorado Department of Transportation is testing the feasibility of a fairer standard: charging for each mile driven instead.
Can Hypothermia Save Gunshot Victims? The New Yorker
Most people who suffer a traumatic gunshot wound die within an hour. Having lost so much blood, their heart can no longer circulate what’s left. A new procedure at University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center, near Baltimore, buys more time by putting the body on ice. When a victim is wheeled in, doctors fill the body with freezing saline, pausing heartbeats and giving them just enough time to sew up the wounds.
Bicyclists Get a Safe Space to Learn Traffic Laws, Fixing a Broken Ballot System and More
White Center Bike Park pleases many ‘spokes people,’ West Seattle Herald
It’s practically an American tradition: Dad takes his child to an empty parking lot to learn to drive a car. Why don’t we have the same for biking? In cyclist-friendly Seattle, a new “traffic garden” — a car-free model of real road, complete with stop signs, roundabouts and one-way streets — in a local park is giving kids a risk-free space to learn traffic laws.
Designing a Better Ballot, The Atlantic
In a country already mired by low voter turnout (two-thirds of citizens didn’t bother to vote in the last midterm election), ballots that go uncounted because they are left blank, unsigned or marked improperly is an even bigger civic concern. In Florida, home of the notorious hanging chad, and other jurisdictions, elections officials are simplifying language and adding design elements to ensure ballots are properly cast — and counted.
This Machine Could Prevent Gun Violence — If Only Cops Used It, The Marshall Project
When it comes to creating a national gun registry, law-abiding firearms owners often feel their Second Amendment rights are in the crosshairs. But if there’s one issue they should be able to agree on, it’s this: reforming an underutilized database that targets only criminal shooters. The National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) helps police track the unique markings imprinted on shell casings and flag matches at other crime scenes, implicating only the perpetrators.
What Wives of Veterans Can Learn from Female Soldiers, How Doctors Are Saving the Lives of Gunshot Victims Before the Trigger Is Ever Pulled and More
What Army Wives Need to Understand About Female Soldiers, The Washington Post
Much is said about bridging the military-civilian divide, but as writer (and wife of a veteran) Lily Burana realizes, there’s also a distance between the women who proudly sport the uniform and those who are married to someone wearing it. Knowing that the military is full of inspirational females — including those now serving in the Ranger division — Burana set out to build a bridge the only way she knew how: by sitting down to lunch and having a chat.
Are Doctors the Key to Ending Philly Gun Violence? Philadelphia Magazine
Renowned for providing lifesaving medical treatment to kids, doctors from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia are focusing their efforts on reducing the cycle of youth violence that plagues the City of Brotherly Love. The hospital’s Violence Intervention Program (VIP) grew out of internal discussions about the Sandy Hill Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., and a shocking report from the city government, which found that 5,051 Philadelphia youth were shot or murdered between 2006 and 2012. It’s difficult to know for sure if the screenings, bully prevention lessons and intensive counseling sessions, which make up VIP, is reducing the number of gunshot victims, but the outlook is hopeful, considering most participants say they desire to be a normal teenager, not one packing heat.
The Power of Vision in Urban Governance, Governing
Every politician may have the goal of being dubbed a “visionary leader,” but Indianapolis’s former four-term mayor, Bill Hudnut, actually was. In order to bring forth the Midwestern city’s potential, Hudnut enlisted help from Indianapolis business and philanthrophic leaders and economic development experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together, these heavy-hitters combined their strengths, collaborating on a plan that eventually brought $1 billion to the local economy — proving that collective vision and use of community assets is key to long-term impact.
A Nonprofit Specializing in Second Chances Gives One to an Aurora Theater Shooting Victim
After Marcus Weaver graduated from college, he landed in jail — a bumpy start to adulthood resulting from poor choices that he came to recognize were influenced by growing up with an abusive stepfather.
Weaver became determined to turn his life around, so when he was released from jail about eight years ago, he went to live at New Genesis, a transitional housing space in Denver. “They offered me a job,” he tells Elizabeth Hernandez of the Denver Post, “and I didn’t screw it up.”
Weaver did much more than just not screw up — he began to help his fellow shelter residents find job placements, clothes for work and places to live. Through his efforts, Weaver connected with DenverWorks, a nonprofit that helps find employment for low-income people with disabilities, criminal records and past addictions. The organization found a job for Weaver: working for them as a mentor to others.
“It felt really great, like this was my purpose,” he says. “If you can give a person a job, that changes everything for them. I felt really good for the first time in my life.”
But then on July 20, 2012, Weaver decided to see the premier of the film “The Dark Knight Rises” with a friend. Chaos erupted when a gunman opened fire inside the theater, killing Weaver’s friend, Rebecca Wingo, and shooting Weaver in the arm.
The trauma of losing his friend and suffering a serious injury on that horrific night rattled him, and he was unable to continue his job. Finally he went to therapy and was diagnosed with PTSD.
Even though Weaver’s arm is still not healed — another surgery is scheduled for November — in March he felt ready to apply for jobs. He found himself back at DenverWorks and now serves as their outreach coordinator since the nonprofit believed that everything he’d been through would make him a big asset mentoring people trying to right their lives after suffering hard knocks.
“I see a lot of my former self in the people I’m helping. You see them change. Get a suit, get an interview, get the job. It’s so important,” says Weaver.
Currently finishing up a degree in nonprofit management, Weaver hopes it might lead to starting his own nonprofit. However lofty his goals, anyone familiar with Marcus Weaver’s life story knows it would be foolish to ever count him out.
MORE: No Longer Afraid: A Young Immigrant Victim of the Aurora Theater Shooting Steps Out of the Shadows