Often cities, like Philadelphia, see the carnage on their streets and set some limits, such as banning assault rifles. Cities come to the conclusion that such weapons don’t belong on their streets any more than grenades do. But over and over, these laws are reversed at a state or federal level, putting more and more people at risk.
We are not talking about banning all guns. We’re not talking about taking away hunting rifles or even handguns. The question we ask is this: Can we create better policies that better protect our “polities”—our people, our shared life together? How can we organize our shared common life so that we all can flourish, so that one person’s freedom is not another person’s bondage? What stands in the way?
Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right. Slavery was legal, but that didn’t make it right. Societies evolve. Laws change. There are things that are not legal now that used to be one hundred years ago. And there are things that are legal now that were illegal one hundred years ago. Some things, like the death penalty, are legal in some places and illegal in others. Places prone to drought and fire regulate fireworks.
Such regulations are not meant to be mindless, unnecessary, bureaucratic barriers. They are meant to keep people safe. To help people flourish. They exist for the common good. Limits are put on individual freedoms—like how fast you can drive or how much you can drink before driving—to create some order and organization to our common life. Few people actually want to do away with the Second Amendment and the right to have guns. Most just want it to be regulated.
Corporate Accountability
As citizens, we must be a moral conscience for those who profit from the madness of gun sales today. Perhaps one of our best strategies can be to organize and leverage consumer power against these companies and stir their conscience. It’s beginning to happen even now. Walmart has voluntarily signed on to a code of conduct to try to reduce gun violence. Dick’s Sporting Goods voluntarily stopped selling assault weapons and destroyed its inventory. We need to applaud these decisions and keep encouraging other gun profiteers to take steps in the right direction.
It has been incredible to watch the public outcry against the NRA create such a groundswell that some of the largest corporations in the world have severed ties: United, Enterprise, Alamo, National, Hertz, Avis, Symantec, MetLife, Wyndham, and Delta. Some of them now face lawsuits as a result.
We need courage. And imagination. Perhaps we can even incentivize good decisions like creating safer guns and new technology such as fingerprint readers for guns. We’ve sent people to the moon, after all, and have drones that can operate like bumblebees—we’ve got this!
We also need to call out the lies, as the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida are doing, who are famous now for the saying “We call B.S.” when they hear the gun industry cover up truth to make money. The very idea that we need guns to protect us from all the guns sure sounds like a marketing pitch from people who are out to sell as many guns as possible, no matter what the hidden costs to life are.
The industry that creates one of the most dangerous products you can buy enjoys total immunity when it comes to any responsibility for harm done. Toy weapons have more regulations than real weapons. If you shoot your friend’s eye out with a Nerf gun, you can sue Nerf. But not so with a Winchester rifle or an AR-15. It’s time for the weapons industry to take the same responsibility as every other industry. Guns should not be exempt from safety requirements and wise regulations. Likewise, gun shops that sell guns irresponsibly should be accountable for the lives that are lost. If a liquor store turns a blind eye to a minor buying alcohol or sells booze to someone they know is already drunk, they can be held responsible.
Guns should not be exempt from safety requirements, responsible regulations, and sensible restrictions. Think about cars. We’ve learned some lessons in how to keep people safe from this technology, which can be deadly. We’ve added seat belts. We require driver’s licenses. You need to register your car and, at least in some states, have it checked for emissions periodically. You need to pass a test before you drive one. There is a limit to the alcohol you can consume before operating one. There are speed limits. And on and on. As society evolves, so do our laws—for instance, some states now make it illegal to text and drive, a new law responding to new technology.
Certainly, irresponsible people still break the rules. But you don’t get rid of traffic laws because some people refuse to stop at red lights. Someone can still acquire a car, legally or illegally, and deliberately use it as a weapon, driving into a crowd like we’ve seen far too often, from Charlottesville to London to Manhattan. We will never stop all violence and murder. People can use a gun to kill, and they can use a van—or a hammer or, apparently, a spoon. At a conference, I (Shane) mentioned how guns exponentially increase the capacity of a person who wants to destroy life, saying, “After all, it’s hard to kill someone with a spoon.” Later I got a flood of emails with links to murders or attempted murders by spoon (mostly in prisons), though I have yet to find a mass murder by spoon. Our goal is to save as many lives as possible. If we knew, just hypothetically, that people were ten times more likely to die from a car in the United States than in Canada or Japan or Belgium, we’re pretty sure we’d work around the clock to solve the problem.
The noteworthy difference between automobiles and guns is that guns are designed to kill. Cars can kill but are not made to kill. It is all the more reason that the gun industry does not deserve the unprecedented immunity it currently enjoys and exploits.
That “freedom” is killing us.
eighteen
Reimagining the World
What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?
—Valarie Kaur
THERE IS SOMETHING POWERFUL, transcendent, and mystical about seeing a gun transformed into something else. When you take the hammer and begin beating, you can hear the sharp thump of metal on metal, rattle and echo. You can feel the impact up your arm and through your body. There’s something sacramental about the process, like how some Christians believe God is present in the Communion table as we eat the bread and drink the wine. There is something holy about seeing an instrument of death transformed into an instrument of life—when swords become plows, when guns become garden tools.
With every gun we transform at RAWtools, it feels as if the world becomes a little safer, as if the heaviness of death lingering over us like a cloud lifts a little. We’ve beaten guns into plows all over the country. We’ve done it on the altars of churches during worship. We’ve done it live on stages at convention centers. We’ve done it in the streets, in garages, in parking lots, and in backyards. We were forging peace.
Chopping an assault rifle [Shane Claiborne]
We did a cross-country trip and turned 9mm pistols into plows in honor of Trayvon Martin. A tool from those guns was auctioned off for thousands of dollars, which we proudly gave to the Trayvon Martin Foundation.
There is one event, though, that we’ll never forget. We teamed up with Terri Roberts, the mother of Charlie Roberts, who was responsible for the Nickel Mines shooting nine years ago. When she picked up a hammer and beat on the barrel of a gun, it wasn’t just about the gun. Terri (who passed away in 2017) was a living witness that God is transforming hearts, not just metal, as she developed a relationship with the Amish families that baffled the mind and healed the soul.
Terri Roberts, mother of the Nickel Mines shooter, transforming a gun [Shane Claiborne]
Rosanna, a young girl who survived the shooting, is in a wheelchair and eats with a feeding tube. Every other Thursday, Terri visited Rosanna and helped bathe her, read with her, and sang with her. Spending time together helped heal the wounds of the tragedy. Every time Terri visited, she was confronted with the damage her son caused. But she was also reminded that violence does not have to get the last word. And each year in October, around the time of the shooting, she had tea with the Amish mothers
as a way of remembering the season and redeeming it.1
As we worked with Terri on transforming the gun, she reminded us that we need God to transform both our hearts and our nation. As we beat on the barrel of that gun, it felt like we were participating in the redemptive work of God in healing hearts and healing streets—beating guns into plows, turning hatred into love.
WE HAVE A DREAM
We have a dream. A dream for every city and rural town in America to have a designated drop spot where people can bring their guns to be donated and repurposed. Each of those locations will have tools and people trained to disable guns. The guns will be disabled and made inoperative as they arrive. Then, scattered throughout the country will be mobile blacksmithing trailers that can collect the gun parts to transform them into tools. We could hire citizens returning from incarceration and thereby create jobs. Then we can bring those tools back to the communities to be instruments of life. Let’s do it.
Growing Hope
It is our prayer that God will heal our heart problem and that some of our politicians will have the courage to help heal our gun problem. The varying perspectives have too long demonized the “other” perspective to the point of no longer being able to dialogue. Many of us have family all across the spectrum. Let’s tell our stories and move forward together. The prerequisite for a solution to end gun violence is that it does not involve more violence and death.
So we ask you to follow the wounded healers to a table. Maybe that table is the top of the anvil, or maybe that table is at your neighbor’s home or at a local park. Go to the table and tell your story. Celebrate your story.
We’d celebrate a community that no longer trains for war but that plots for peace, a community that doesn’t let fear dictate how neighbors interact with one another and whether they welcome a stranger. These celebrations can be built with tools that have been transformed from a past we are ready to leave behind. We can recognize the past through the ritual transformation of swords into plowshares.
We’ve seen activists and police officers take the hammer together. We’ve had folks shot by guns and folks who have shot people with guns beat on the same anvil.
We’ve seen standing side by side at the forge Republicans and Democrats, war vets and pacifists, old people and young kids, homeless folks and survivors of genocides, politicians and anarchists, conservatives and liberals, Christians and atheists, Jews and Muslims, war hawks and peaceniks—the forge brings us all together. We have hope for a world free from fear and violence. We stand together around the warmth of the forge and dream of a new world.
The fire of the forge is a refining fire
We’ve seen veterans transform the guns they brought back from war.
We’ve had guns donated that people had intended to use to kill themselves.
We’ve transformed assault rifles and handguns.
We may not all agree on politics, or even on the gun control debate, but something feels right about taking the hammer together and transforming an AR-15 into garden tools. It unites former adversaries and creates common ground where there’s previously been misunderstanding. It creates a space to pray, to breathe, to heal. The fire of the forge softens every heart.
As we embarked on this adventure of transforming weapons, we started getting stories and images sent to us from around the world of others doing the same thing.
Memorial to the Lost
WEST NICKEL MINES SCHOOL, NICKEL MINES, PENNSYLVANIA (OCTOBER 2, 2006)
On October 2, 2006, a man entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun. By the end of the shooting, five young girls had been killed and several others injured.
The response from the Amish community at Nickel Mines was one of anguish but also forgiveness. They fascinated the world as they comforted the family of the shooter and attended his funeral to mourn the loss of his life as well as their own children. They also shared the donations given to them with the shooter’s family, to help support the children of the shooter. In the end the families found a way forward together that stunned the world. We detail this story further in this chapter, and we have had the privilege of finishing a gun transformation with Terri Roberts, the mother of the shooter.
The schoolhouse was demolished and a new school building was constructed with the name New Hope School. Here are the names of the lives lost that day:
Naomi Rose Ebersol, 7 Mary Liz Miller, 7
Marian Stoltzfus Fisher, 13 Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12
Lena Zook Miller, 8
One guy made a guitar out of handguns. Someone else made a bicycle.
Another fellow in Mozambique made a saxophone out of a semiautomatic.
Our friends in Iraq poured guns into the street and ran over them with a steamroller, crushing them into oblivion. And they let kids drive.
Peace Day in Najaf, Iraq [Sami Rasouli]
In the holy city where Jesus was born, the “little town of Bethlehem,” violence is still real. Tear-gas canisters are regularly fired at Palestinians there. Some creative minds came together and began gathering the canisters and making Christmas ornaments out of them, creating jobs for Palestinian families and making something beautiful out of something terrible.
People are hearing the ring of the anvil. It echoes both to those lost to gun violence in the past and to those fed from community gardens in the future. We must not let guns beat us any longer. They do not need to be a part of the weave of the fabric of our society.
There is a way to beat guns. And it addresses the triggers in our hearts as well as the triggers in our streets. We need everyone at the table. Those who believe we don’t have a gun problem need to be at the table teaching us how to deal with our heart problem. Those who believe we do have a gun problem need to be at the table offering creative ways to move our society away from nearly unfettered access to guns and toward responsible gun ownership. We must not allow ourselves to be cold and removed from the softening of the forge. We must lean into each other, without fear of the other.
Christmas ornament made from a tear-gas canister, https://peaceparcels.com [Shane Claiborne]
Forging a New World
The paradox we find ourselves in is that we use the same resources to make tools for either kingdom—the kingdom of this world and God’s kingdom. We use wood and metal to make guns and to make plows. In fact, in my (Mike’s) local library the reference section has gunsmithing literally bookended with woodworking and blacksmithing. There aren’t any books near there on plowshares—yet.
This captures an important part of the power of going from swords to plows. We’re not doing this because the world is devoid of the threat of violent conflict and it is now safe to lay down our weapons. We’re doing it because transformation occurs when you turn swords into plows in spite of the threat of violence. This transformation is a witness to a way of life that says, “I am not only committing to never taking life from a person; I am also committing to keeping the tools that do so out of my life and habits.”
This is when I hear, “Hammers and cars kill people too—why not make them into plowshares while you’re at it?” This is a more deflective than constructive argument. I know that somewhere in history there has been someone killed with a garden tool, and I’ve been told that RAWtools’ garden tools would make good blunt-force killing objects. All of this misses what changing swords to plows is about. The more we surround ourselves with plows, the more we will find ourselves creating life. The more we produce with plows, the more we see others as recipients of that (sometimes actual) produce. The more we surround ourselves with guns, the more we will see people, animals, and things as targets.
Our imaginations work with the tools we have. We expand on the possibility of our tools by reinventing them. Sometimes we use things in ways they were not designed for. The empire of violence can take almost any device and weaponize it. The kingdom of God needs to be better at taking any device and transforming it. This is the hard
work ahead. To make something new often leaves little that resembles the past, but it also opens new possibilities for the future.
Violence is all around us. But so are the seeds of a new world.
Some will say, “All we can do is pray.” That’s a lie.
We can pray, and we must pray. Gun violence is spiritual.
Marching at Demand the Ban [Shane Claiborne]
But we can do more than pray. We can organize. We can dialogue. We can boycott and keep vigil. We can write letters and make phone calls and go to jail for nonviolent civil disobedience. Gun violence is social and political and economic; it is also a moral issue.
We need courage. We need to turn up the volume for love and life. After a string of mass shootings with AR-15s (and similar guns), we teamed up in Philadelphia for an event called “Demand the Ban,” focusing on assault weapons, those military-style guns that are designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible, and that are often the weapon of choice for mass shooters.
We took an AR-15 and turned it into a plow. Then hundreds of us marched together, carrying the plow and wearing T-shirts with the names of hundreds of people killed by assault rifles. We delivered the plow as a gift to Senator Pat Toomey. And we were determined not to leave until he agreed to champion the current bill before Congress that would ban assault weapons. He hasn’t agreed yet, but we are hopeful. We sat in the rain, singing and praying. And thirty-three of us were arrested (the charges were later dropped). As the police led us into a bus where we were held, many of them thanked us for what we were doing and the spirit in which we did it. After all, AR-15s kill police officers too. We’re still hoping Senator Toomey and other politicians will have courage, but we will not wait on them. We cannot wait.
Beating Guns Page 23
