Meet The Blacksmiths Who Transform Guns Into Garden Tools

Bishop Currie carries weapons carved from the gun room

Reverend Jim Curry, right, fires up the furnace in his portable blacksmith shop in the parking lot of Christ Episcopal Church in Guilford, Connecticut. The oven glows orange and makes a slight humming sound. Reaching 2,000 degrees, the blasted shot parts are hot enough to soften the metal tray, so it can be hammered into an anvil.

Many people watch and Carrie chooses a 9-year-old boy named Oliver to help her.

"It's really magical," Curry said. “Before your eyes, you will see Oliver turn this weapon, this potential weapon of evil, into something that is no longer a gun. It will be a palette.

Cary places the saw blade on the anvil of the shotgun barrel and hammers Oliver. Oliver carefully drops the stone at first, shards of burning metal falling around his feet. The steel shot barrel begins to bend. It recreates the palette that you can use to plant flowers in the garden.

"It was fun," Oliver said. "I love that you take random metal and turn it into something useful."

Carey, a retired bishop, is one of the founders of Swords to Plowshares Northeast, an event organizer that helps police departments run gun take-back programs and hand guns to the community. Garden tools. Often the protestors are prisoners, volunteer blacksmiths or, on this day last winter, eager members of the public. According to the group's website, finished equipment is donated to community gardens and agricultural high schools, while harvested vegetables are donated to soup kitchens and homeless shelters.

Curry says he was inspired by a Mennonite group in Colorado that turned his gun into a gardening tool. The phrase "sword into plowshare" has biblical origins.

"It comes from the prophet Isaiah, who spoke of a very confused, violent and uncertain society," he says. “And what he said is that they beat swords into plowshares and spears into fishhooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. In the year An impressive sentiment considering that nearly 49,000 Americans will be killed by guns by 2021.

Retired Episcopalian Rev. Mary Ann Osborne first volunteered to Plowshare with a sword when a family member was the victim of a gun attack. Assists the police in acquiring weapons.

"You see guns lying there — AR-15s, handguns, old guns — and then you see them break," he says. "And you see people here who go to Neville and hammer and then dig a garden and grow something. You really see the change.

The hammer, anvil and forge are strong signs that the epidemic of gun violence can be turned into something positive and peaceful. "Now that there is so much despair in our country, people need to know that we can change, and there is hope," he said.

Curry wears that hope around his neck as a constant reminder. They are two large irons made in the shape of a cross. In the year When the Mozambican civil war ended in the 1990s, artists found ways to collect weapons used during the war and create such works of art.

He said it was made from AK-47 parts, the automatic action and pistons used to kill. "But God takes that material and then God's love breaks it down, transforms it again, and then turns it into the symbol of the greatest hope: the cross. And that's why I wear it."

Meet the blacksmiths who turned guns into garden sheds, first published by Reader's Digest.