In the Bible there's a verse about turning your swords into plowshares. That inspiration
behind what Raw tools does, to take these guns and turn them into garden tools, it's a significant
symbol for what it means to to take something that would be used for violence and and war and turn
into something that brings life and personally as someone who likes gardening and likes
growing things from the ground and finding new life in that it means a lot to me as a symbol.
RAW tools was started by Mike Martin in Colorado Springs 8 or 10 years ago to
provide a way for people to convert their firearms into garden tools. One of our main tenants here
is to work at restoring peace to the city, this is one way that is a personal way for a person
to decommission a gun and thus take one more gun out of circulation in the city. The church
is involved because we support that kind of a thing in helping people decommission their guns.
my name is Bethany Rydmark, I live in Portland, Oregon and i'm a landscape architect
and a wife and a mom and a neighbor.
I'm planning to take my gun and go to the church and have the folks there help me
decommission it so that they can send that raw material back and turn it into a garden tool and
i'll be able to know that that's that's the end of the life cycle of this weapon. It just feels a lot
obviously like it's something you can feel it like it's dense it's heavy it's it was well made
I've been thinking about this for quite a long time but i'm eager to take the handgun that i'm responsible
for that i own, it's been living in a safe for years and give it over to this organization that
does good work to disassemble it and pull it out of use so that it no longer has a life as a weapon.
i don't want to pass it on i don't want it to go to the next owner down the line. There are too
many guns out there available for the needs that we have as humans in my opinion and we've talked
a lot with our kids about the world as we can explain it to them as long and little people and
it means a lot to me to have them kind of see and be aware of this too you know. Well should we, yeah
yeah what do we do what we try to do is we try to cut across this area. It's a fairly violent process
to decommission a gun. We clamped that thing in the saw and we saw it in half.
Maybe as people see that there's an alternative to just giving their guns away
or maybe they can also make a statement by having it turned into something useful.
all right this one was forged out of the barrel of a gun they basically flattened it on the forge.
this one is actually made out of a shotgun barrel and then they split the barrel down through here
and made it red hot and then forged it.
This is the gun that i had decommissioned a couple weeks ago
at the church and i chose to do this because it's a symbol of controversy on both sides
of the argument around guns and I wasn't comfortable owning it anymore and so I wanted
to decommission it and also provide an avenue to discuss my experience with those around me.
There are always analogies in the garden right, you've got a deadhead, you've gotta
get rid of the old things that have served their purpose and are no longer, no longer looking good.
we get to each choose how can we be thoughtful
and wise people and there's so much more potential for finding solutions.