Forging Peace and Disarming Hearts

Inside the Guns to Gardens Movement

Teresa kept pounding away over the face of the anvil on the gun metal as it drifted from bright orange to a dull red. Then the piece went back into the forge to heat up again. Over and over, she brought the face of the cross peen hammer down on the frame of the gun. The shop was hot and noisy with the forge’s venturi jets sucking air to mix in with the spray of propane to create a 2000 degrees Fahrenheit chamber for heating metal. When the gun reached about 1600 degrees, I pulled it out of the forge with tongs and held it for her to hit again and again. In time, Teresa had done all the work she could with the hammer and anvil.

Naval Criminal Investigative Service sent this gun to our shop. It was the last thing Teresa’s son Lance Corporal Alexander Schrachta held. He died at 19 on active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps, losing his life to suicide in the barracks. In our shop, Alex’s siblings picked up the hammer after their mom. They worked with lighter blows and greater precision, turning parts of the recoil spring assembly into a pair of hearts and a section of the slide into “dog tags” with an olive branch stamped into it. The olive branch is the maker’s mark of RAWtools South. We are on a mission to disarm hearts, forge peace, and cultivate justice. Our name comes from the word “war” spelled backwards. We strive to flip the violence paradigm.

Mike Martin, a Mennonite pastor from Colorado Springs, Colorado, and founder of RAWtools, learned how to blacksmith after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, so he could turn guns into garden tools. He soon hooked up with Shane Claiborne, a free-range evangelical from Philly who was doing something similar. Together, they wrote the book Beating Guns and started a national movement turning guns into garden tools and art.

Working on ranches in Wyoming and Montana, I picked up basic welding and later got into blacksmithing to bend metal for sculptures. Shane needed a blacksmith for some gigs and asked me and we hit it off. Taken by this work, I traveled to Colorado for a week with Mike and his dad, Fred Martin, in their blacksmith shop. It became clear that these folks not only “speak my mind,” but are living into our Quaker peace testimony in an irresistible way. One thing kept leading to another and then another; I wasn’t just “going as Way opens.” It felt more like Way kept vacuuming me in.

I had cut up a gun before. Years earlier, during a meeting for worship, near the anniversary of 9/11, a Friend gave vocal ministry about our nation’s continuing violence and our complicity. Moved by Spirit, that afternoon I took my cutting torch to a shotgun that I bought in seminary (from another seminarian) about 20 years earlier; it was the first firearm I transformed.

A couple years later, with the support of Asheville (N.C.) Meeting and later Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting, RAWtools South was launched in 2023. Since then, we have been partnering with faith communities and nonprofit organizations to host gun-safe disposal events across the South, branded “Guns to Gardens.” Community members can bring in their unwanted guns to be destroyed. We show up with a van and trailer full of protective gear, metal-cutting chop saws, grinders, vices, tents, generators, and everything else needed to cut up guns according to the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) guidelines. Then we pack up the former guns, now scrap metal, and head back to our shop and transform them into garden tools and art. With the small gun bits and pieces, we make pendants and totems so folks can carry a little slice of transformation with them. These traces of guns can spark conversations with friends and neighbors about the violence in our country and other ways we can live.

The Guns to Gardens movement is growing. People of faith are hungry for more than thoughts and prayers. They want to do more than march and send letters to politicians but often feel stymied by our stuck system. This movement has injected new life into the communities, where folks of faith (and of no faith) get their hands dirty chopping up unwanted guns. This is something practical we can do in our own communities to make a difference. The Presbyterian Peace Fellowship is a leader of this movement; they offer “action circles,” a free six-week (one-hour per week) Zoom training on how to hold a gun-safe disposal event in your town. As more and more folks wanted in on this fun, it became clear that we needed greater consistency with how people should handle the firearms.

Stan Wilson, the coordinator for RAWtools South and co-pastor of Circle of Mercy Church in Asheville, and I begrudgingly sought out National Rifle Association (NRA) firearm safety training because of insurance. It’s been super helpful in surprising ways. Of course we needed to be experts in how to to handle guns safely; how to drop a magazine; and how to clear the chamber of all the seemingly endless variations of muzzleloaders and other single shot, single action, double action, bolt action, lever action, break action, pump action, and semi-automatic firearms. But becoming more fluent in how to speak the language of folks who live inside gun culture has really helped bridge the divide between “us” and “them.”

One pet peeve of gun folks is when “libs” talk about “clips” when they really mean “mags” (i.e., magazines) or when folks say “bullet” when they are talking about a “cartridge.” Taking time to understand and learn the language that others employ demonstrates respect for them. It’s also been really meaningful to be in a relationship with our NRA instructors, who we esteem and have surprised us. Knowing and enjoying the company of folks who see this issue from a completely different vantage point is essential; it centers everyone’s humanity. It’s harder to throw shade or think something snarky or demeaning when you are in a relationship with the “other.” Similarly becoming a gun dealer (having a Federal Firearms Licence) has opened up doors for us that would have otherwise remained closed. Seeking out proximity is essential.

This work depends on us partnering with gun owners. In keeping with Martin Luther King Jr.’s approach, we believe that the goal of Christian nonviolence is not to defeat or humiliate our “opponents,” but to win their friendship and understanding. Sometimes folks have some guns they want to get rid of and others they want to keep; we get that. We will help them safely dispose of the ones they want to be freed from and then talk to them about safe storage of their remaining firearms.

When someone is going through a difficult time, we can store their firearms in our shop’s safe till that wave has passed. Our calling is to meet folks where they are and then strive to take the next step alongside them to make our communities safer.

So when we got the call from Teresa, who had lost her son, we told her we wanted to help her transform the firearm he’d used to take his life. Instead of Naval Criminal Investigative Service sending the pistol to her, we arranged for them to ship it to our shop so she wouldn’t have to handle it. Stan and I reached into our faith traditions to come up with what has become a rite of transformation for families living after a loved one has died by suicide.

This rite includes silence and some short readings—often Scripture—that reflect the family’s faith tradition. It also includes cutting or crushing the firearm. Family members get to transform the object that was created for killing and turn it into something new and life-giving. At the end, we anneal a section of the firearm, usually the barrel, by heating it up to its critical temperature, letting it soak, and placing it deep in vermiculite to cool slowly over night. “Annealing” is the metallurgical term for softening metal that has been hardened and tempered. Annealing takes time. It requires heat and abundant insulation to allow it to cool slowly. Our hearts are like metal in this way: trauma can quickly harden our hearts, and they can become brittle. Healing, like annealing, usually happens slowly.

It’s been a couple years since Teresa and her kids traveled from Memphis, Tennessee, to our shop in the Appalachian Mountains, but we keep in touch. We have gotten to share meals together at Guns to Gardens events. Thanks to Teresa and her courage in reaching out to us, we got started on a new path. We now regularly work with families who have experienced the trauma of gun violence, usually sucicide, and create a rite of transformation tailored to them.

This work that found us is about more than trying to curb gun violence. It’s about dialing into a larger community and actively living out the prophetic vision of a time when people will “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:4 in the New International Version). It is about building up the beloved community Micah goes on to depict as a place where “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid” (Micah 4:4, NIV).

Beating guns into garden tools is just the first step toward making people safe and ensuring everyone has a shady spot to enjoy life. It’s a step in the way toward the reality of Christ’s peace and community testimonies.