Shane arrested at Demand the Ban
When we ask God why thirty-eight thousand lives are lost each year, God may throw the question back to us: Why do we allow it?
When we ask God to move a mountain, sometimes God hands us a shovel. Or an anvil. One of the greatest mysteries of our faith is that, for some strange reason, God does not want to change the world without us.
When we make changes in society, we need rituals to help us transition. Sometimes we repeat them to build habits.
Turning swords to plows is a ritual. It’s a ritual of celebration and a ritual of lament, a ritual of commitment and a ritual of letting go. It’s a ritual of wounded healing so that there are no more wounds.
And it’s a party. The anvil rings and rejoices with the roar of the forge as we all lean into each other. There is dancing too. And music is played on instruments made from weapons of war. Slides on handguns are made into tuning forks.
We are different with a plow in our hands than we are with a gun in our hands. We move from a life of individualism into a life of community, away from a life where we can dictate what we do, no matter the season, into a life that is centered on seasons: harvest, planting, resting, plowing. Seasonal life brings seasonal celebrations, a life where we no longer enter seasons of mass shootings but instead enter seasons of great harvests.
Mike at the anvil [Shane Claiborne]
So we come back to the blacksmith shop. The place where every tool can trace its origin to. It’s a place where we are given the opportunity to create anew. It’s a place with an opportunity for a fresh start. We can use steel to make plows, and we can use guns as source material. And when the guns run out, nation will not lift up sword against nation, because there will be no swords left to lift. Turning swords to plows brings us away from the immediate, instant, and fatal consequences of empire and toward the patient, seasonal, and creative consequences of Jesus’s kingdom.
The Bible doesn’t end with us returning to the garden of Eden. It ends with the vision of the new Jerusalem—a city that has been healed and restored, with a river of life and a tree of life and a gate that is left open to all. How beautiful it is that the Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city! The new Jerusalem is a city brought back to life, a city where the gates are left open and kids can play without fear.
If that is the end of the story, it should influence the way we live now: we live into the future the prophets foretold and we inaugurate the new world. Let’s keep the forge ready and the fire hot as we wait for the next person to disarm. There are about three hundred million guns in the US. That’ll take a while. But imagine the tools, art, and musical instruments we can make with all that metal.
The prophets spoke of beating guns into plows. And we are committed to building the world the prophets dreamed of. The prophets leave us with a final glimpse of that world: Zechariah says “the city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing” (Zech. 8:5). And Zephaniah adds, “No one will make them afraid” (Zeph. 3:13). Don’t forget: according to the prophets, the vision of a renewed world ends with the wolf and the lamb living together, and the lion and the calf lying down together, and nation not rising up against nation, and kids playing without fear, and people no longer learning violence. But it begins with us. It is not the kings and presidents and politicians who lead the way to peace. It is the people who rise up, refuse to kill, and begin beating their weapons into garden tools. We are the people we are waiting for.
May we be the midwives of a better world—through our prayers, by our lives, and with our hammers.
Acknowledgments
These little sections in which authors give shout-outs to everyone who helped them with the book often get skipped over by readers, like the credits at the end of a movie. But we want you to know that we literally could not have done this book without the love and support and gifted talents of these friends.
This book would be incomplete without thanking them.
First, we are grateful beyond words for Shane’s wife, Katie Jo, and Mike’s wife, Hannah (who came up with the name for RAWtools). And Mike’s two boys who have lovingly welcomed him home after traveling. We are thankful for our families, some of whom are gun owners who have patiently read this book with an open mind, and especially for Mike’s dad, Fred, who helped found and shape RAWtools from the very beginning. We’d like to thank Angela Scheff, Rebekah Devine, and Adam Bacher, as well as Eric Salo, Jeremy Wells, Jim Kinney, and our whole team at Brazos Press. Without them this book would not be nearly as beautiful or as poignant or as precise as what you have here (our first draft had over seven hundred fact checks!). We are grateful for the countless artists and photographers, especially Pedro Reyes, Paul Villinski, and Esther Augsburger (who have made so many marvelous things from guns), who have opened the imaginations of many people. There are so many who have contributed to this book—with their stories and lives, their expertise and imagination: Sharletta Evans, Laurie Works, Benjamin Corey, Michael McBride, Lucy McBath, Sami Rasouli, Fr. Michael Pfleger, Bryan Miller, and Rob Schenck. We’ve built on the great scholarship of folks like James Atwood, Pamela Haag, Vox, Everytown for Gun Safety, and many others to whom we are indebted. And we’re thrilled and honored about the film Beating Guns produced by our pal Rex Harsin, released alongside this book.
Finally, to the everyday peacemakers who are committed to beating guns into plows and reimagining the world, you inspire us: folks like Christian Peacemaker Teams, Preemptive Love Coalition, Mennonite Central Committee, Beth-El Mennonite Church, About Face, Veterans for Peace, Campaign Nonviolence, PICO’s Live Free Campaign, Moms Demand Action, the Movement for Black Lives, the students from Parkland, Pax Christi, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Global Immersion Project, Heeding God’s Call, CeaseFire, the Plowshares movement, and so many others.
Notes
Introduction
1. We are indebted to James Atwood for his tireless scholarship and work on gun violence, particularly his books America and Its Guns: A Theological Exposé (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012) and Gundamentalism (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017). We have built on some of his ideas and his scholarship here and are grateful for his friendship and support. Few folks have done a better job at shaping the conversation around God and guns than Atwood. We highly recommend reading his work.
Chapter 1: Turning Weapons into Farm Tools (and Other Lovely Things)
1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Fatal Injury Reports, National, Regional and State, 1981–2016,” WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System), updated February 19, 2017, https://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate.html.
2. Mekialaya White, “Colorado Springs Group Holds Silent Walk, Sending Loud Message about Gun Violence,” KRDO (News Channel 13), updated July 15, 2016, http://www.krdo.com/news/local-news/colorado-springs-group-holds-silent-walk-sending-loud-message-about-gun-violence/35507160.
3. Dale Frederickson, “Fragile Trigger” (poem), in Keeping Pulse (n.p.: Samizdat Creative, 2016), available at https://youtu.be/loH5w5Uroho.
4. Rachel Yehuda et al., “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation,” Biological Psychiatry 80, no. 5 (September 2016): 372–80, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.08.005.
Chapter 2: The Mess We Find Ourselves In
1. Eli Rosenberg, “A Teen Missed the Bus to School. When He Knocked on a Door for Directions, a Man Shot at Him,” Washington Post, April 13, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/04/13/a-teen-missed-the-bus-to-school-when-he-knocked-on-a-door-for-directions-a-man-shot-at-him.
2. Nicole Flatow, “Father Shoots and Kills 14-Year-Old Daughter, Saying He Mistook Her for Burglar,” ThinkProgress, December 24, 2013, https://thinkprogress.org/father-shoots-and-kills-14-year-old-daughter-saying-he-mistook-her-for-burglar-a4bf5e6d3290.
3. This statistic is from E. G. Krug, K. E. Powell, and L. L. Dahlberg, “Firearm-Related Deaths in the United States and 35 Other High- and Upper-Midd
le-Income Countries,” International Journal of Epidemiology 27, no. 2 (April 1998): 214–21, cited in James Atwood, America and Its Guns: A Theological Exposé (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), 160.
4. Libby Nelson and Javier Zarracina, “A Shocking Statistic about Gun Deaths in the US,” Vox, December 4, 2015, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/4/9851102/gun-deaths-us-children. Vox used information from Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Homicide, Suicide, and Unintentional Firearm Fatality: Comparing the United States with Other High-Income Countries, 2003,” Journal of Trauma 70, no. 1 (January 2011): 238–43, https://doi.org/10.1097/TA.0b013e3181dbaddf.
5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Fatal Injury Reports, National, Regional and State, 1981–2016,” WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System), updated February 19, 2017, https://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate.html.
6. More American citizens were killed with guns in the eighteen-year period between 1979 and 1997 (651,697) than all the US servicemen and women killed in all the foreign wars since 1775 (650,858). Atwood, America and Its Guns, 52.
7. Arwa Mahdawi, “Sacha Baron Cohen’s Scheme to Arm Toddlers Isn’t Far from Reality,” Guardian (US edition), July 16, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/16/sacha-baron-cohen-guns-children-toddlers-who-is-america-reality.
8. Ryan Sit, “More Children Have Been Killed by Guns since Sandy Hook Than U.S. Soldiers in Combat since 9/11,” Newsweek, March 16, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/gun-violence-children-killed-sandy-hook-military-soldiers-war-terror-911-848602.
9. Gregg Zoroya, “Suicide Surpassed War as the Military’s Leading Cause of Death,” USA Today, October 31, 2014, https://www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2014/10/31/suicide-deaths-us-military-war-study/18261185; Leo Shane III and Patricia Kime, “New VA Study Finds 20 Veterans Commit Suicide Each Day,” Military Times, July 7, 2016, https://www.militarytimes.com/veterans/2016/07/07/new-va-study-finds-20-veterans-commit-suicide-each-day.
10. Lindsey Donovan, “Disgraceful Gun Bill Endangers Veterans: Army Vet,” USA Today, March 29, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/03/29/gun-bill-endangers-mentally-ill-veterans-suicide-army-vet-column/99740790.
11. German Lopez, “America’s Gun Problem, Explained,” Vox, May 18, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-states-america. One source says thirty-one gun deaths per million: Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz, “Comparing Gun Deaths by Country: The U.S. Is in a Different World,” New York Times, June 13, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/upshot/compare-these-gun-death-rates-the-us-is-in-a-different-world.html. Another source says 38.5 gun deaths per million: Nurith Aizenman, “Gun Violence: How the U.S. Compares with Other Countries,” Goats and Soda (NPR), October 6, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/06/555861898/gun-violence-how-the-u-s-compares-to-other-countries.
12. Lopez, “America’s Gun Problem, Explained.”
13. Alan I. Leshner, Bruce M. Altevogt, Arlene F. Lee, Margaret A. McCoy, and Patrick W. Kelley, eds., Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2013), http://nap.edu/18319.
14. National Institute of Justice, “Gun Violence,” updated March 13, 2018, https://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/gun-violence/pages/welcome.aspx.
15. “Handguns for 18-Year-Olds?,” editorial, New York Times, November 25, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/opinion/26fri1.html.
16. Lopez, “America’s Gun Problem, Explained.”
17. Leanna Garfield, “There Are 50,000 More Gun Shops Than McDonald’s in the US,” Business Insider, October 6, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/gun-dealers-stores-mcdonalds-las-vegas-shooting-2017-10.
18. Christopher Ingraham, “40 Million More Guns Than People,” Washington Post, October 5, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/05/guns-in-the-united-states-one-for-every-man-woman-and-child-and-then-some.
19. Gun sales for 2016 were over 4 million more than in 2015. Leonard Greene, “Record 27 Million Guns Sold across the U.S. in 2016, 4 Million More Than the Previous Year,” New York Daily News, January 4, 2017, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/record-27-million-guns-sold-u-s-2016-article-1.2934554.
There were 11 million guns manufactured in 2016. Damian Paletta, “U.S. Gun Manufacturers Have Produced 150 Million Guns since 1986,” Denver Post, February 23, 2018, https://www.denverpost.com/2018/02/23/how-many-guns-are-there.
There were 9.36 million guns produced in 2015: “Number of Firearms Manufactured in the U.S. from 1986 to 2015,” Statista, accessed June 6, 2018, https://www.statista.com/statistics/215395/number-of-total-firearms-manufactured-in-the-us.
20. Harry Enten, “There’s a Gun for Every American. But Less Than a Third Own Guns,” CNN, February 15, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/15/politics/guns-dont-know-how-many-america/index.html.
21. Rick Jervis, “3% of Americans Own Half the Country’s 265 Million Guns,” USA Today, updated September 22, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/09/22/study-guns-owners-violence/90858752.
22. Enten, “There’s a Gun for Every American.”
23. Dara Lind, “Who Owns Guns in America? White Men, Mostly,” Vox, December 4, 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/12/4/9849524/gun-race-statistics.
24. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” (sermon, New York, April 4, 1967), https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/beyond-vietnam.
25. This is from one of the most thorough studies of crime guns available: US Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, “Commerce in Firearms in the United States,” February 2000, http://www.joebrower.com/RKBA/RKBA_FILES/GOV_DOCS/BATF_report_020400.pdf. Also cited at Christopher Ingraham, “New Evidence Confirms What Gun Rights Advocates Have Said for a Long Time about Crime,” Washington Post, July 27, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/27/new-evidence-confirms-what-gun-rights-advocates-have-been-saying-for-a-long-time-about-crime; Mayors against Illegal Guns, “Inside Straw Purchasing: How Criminals Get Guns Illegally,” Everytown for Gun Safety, April 15, 2008, https://everytownresearch.org/reports/inside-straw-purchasing-criminals-get-guns-illegally; and Atwood, America and Its Guns, 170.
26. “The Truth about Gun Dealers in America,” Brady Campaign and Brady Center, accessed July 23, 2018, http://www.bradycampaign.org/sites/default/files/TheTruthAboutGunDealersInAmerica.pdf.
Chapter 3: Gun History 101
1. We are grateful for the brilliant work of Pamela Haag, whose book The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2016) was instrumental in this section on gun history and is one of the most thorough histories on guns in America. Her bibliography is seventy-three pages long.
2. Haag, Gunning of America, 189.
3. Haag, Gunning of America, 189.
4. Haag, Gunning of America, 354.
5. Ramon F. Adams, Six-Guns and Saddle Leather: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on Western Outlaws and Gunmen (New York: Dover, 1969), cited in Haag, Gunning of America, 354.
6. Haag, Gunning of America, 355.
7. Haag, Gunning of America, 357.
8. Stegner, The American West as Living Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), 69.
9. Cartwright, “The Cowboy Subculture,” in Guns in America: A Reader, ed. Jan E. Dizard, Robert Muth, and Stephen P. Andrews (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 86–87, cited in Haag, Gunning of America, 201.
10. Thomas McDade, The Annals of Murder: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on American Murders from Colonial Times to 1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961).
11. “Fist, feet, sticks and bricks still outnumbered guns and knives combined.” Roger Lane, Murder in America: A History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), 129, cited in Haag, Gunning of America, 418n1.
12. Haag, Gunning of America, 355.
13. Haag, Gunning of America, 13.<
br />
14. Haag, Gunning of America, 109.
15. Haag, Gunning of America, 53.
16. Haag, Gunning of America, 34.
17. Haag, Gunning of America, 30.
18. Haag, Gunning of America, 63.
19. Haag, Gunning of America, 29.
20. Henry Barnard, Armsmear: The Home, the Arm, and the Armory of Samuel Colt (New York, 1866), 198, https://books.google.com/books?id=BEEBAAAAQAAJ.
21. “How I Invented Maxim Gun—Hiram Maxim, Outbreak of World War Moves Veteran American to Describe for the Times His Epoch-Making Invention,” New York Times, November 1, 1914, cited in Haag, Gunning of America, 36.
22. Haag, Gunning of America, 104.
23. Haag, Gunning of America, 113.
24. Haag, Gunning of America, xvii.
25. Winchester Repeating Arms Company Archives Collection (WRAC), D. H. Veader and A. W. Earle, typescript, “The Story of the WRAC. This Includes Its Predecessors, the Volcanic Repeating Firearms Company and the New Haven Arms Company,” 27, quoted in Haag, Gunning of America, 122.
26. Haag, Gunning of America, 40.
27. Haag, Gunning of America, 119.
Beating Guns Page 24
