Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16Guns are tools, right? Police and soldiers use them to do their jobs, and many citizens feel safer with one strapped on. In the United States, the only country with more guns than people, it’s no surprise that these weapons feature daily in the news: from terror attacks and mass shoot- ings to the less publicized but more widespread epidemics of handgun violence, suicide, and accidental shootings by children. Turn War Around The Second Amend- ment enshrines a distinctly American – and, some would say, sacred – freedom: the right to bear arms. How to reconcile that with the need to curb gun violence? Michael Martin, a young Mennonite from Colorado Springs, decided the best way to approach this emotionally charged issue was to tell a different story – to counter the debilitating stream of tragic news with an alternative narrative of transformation and restoration, one tool at a time. Martin won’t take away your rights, but if you happen to have a gun you want to be rid of, he’ll be happy to forge it into a garden tool for you. The idea hatched back in 2009 as Martin watched news coverage of the christening of the USS New York, a battleship with a bow stem made of steel from the fallen World Trade Center. (“Notice how they bring Christ into it.”) Someone needed to counteract this rhetoric and symbolism of revenge, Martin felt. A big fan of Walter Brueggemann’s approach to the Old Testament, he latched onto Isaiah’s words, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” The prophet Micah repeats this refrain and adds, “They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” So, repurposing weapons to grow food as a way to drive out fear. “That’s our end goal: to get to the point where we’re not afraid of each other anymore.” It wasn’t until Adam Lanza opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, killing twenty children and six adults, that Martin knew he needed to act. His wife, Hannah, sug- gested they call their project RAWtools. (“You get RAW when you turn WAR around.”) “Alongside the destruc- tive narratives that the guns come out of, we want to share the creation narratives that have been born out of those – stories and pictures of the beautiful gardens and food being grown with the tools.” World Trade Center steel is forged into a warship. Photos by George Trian; Annie Elis (public domain) Sam Hine is an editor at Plough.