The Nationwide Movement Turning Guns Into Garden Tools

The Nationwide Movement Turning Guns Into Garden Tools

The Nationwide Movement Turning Guns Into Garden Tools T he first time Mike Martin held an AK-47 was after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, which claimed the lives of 20 children and six adults. The shooting shocked a friend of a friend, a lawyer, into questioning why he owned an AK-47 in the first place. “He decided to destroy that one,” Martin recalls.  As a Mennonite youth and young adult pastor, Martin had long contemplated the idea of interpreting the “swords to ploughshares” ideal from the Book of Isaiah in a modern context. “My faith tradition is rooted in peace and non-violence,” he says. Together with his father and the lawyer, Martin took the AK-47 to a nearby blacksmith in Colorado Springs, dismantled it and forged the metal into a shovel and a rake. “There’s this thing about turning guns into garden tools,” Martin reflects in the book Beating Guns . “You have to add some heat — a little more than 2,000 degrees of controlled flame.” This moment sparked t…