CANTON – There are an estimated 393 million guns in the United States.
On Sunday, 60 of them will be melted down and turned into gardening tools.
The initiative is a part of the Festival of Nonviolence and Peacemaking, put on by peacemaking initiative group Together NEO. The festival is taking place throughout Northeast Ohio and ends Sunday in Canton.
Author and activist Shane Claiborne will conduct a RAWtools ceremony, melting disassembled guns and turn them into gardening tools.
The Canton leg of the event will take place from 3 to 7 p.m. Sunday in Nimisilla Park, 1075 O’Jays Blvd. NE. Music and other festivities centered around nonviolence will take place alongside the smithing ceremony.
Ceremonies began Thursday night at Akron Cooperative Farms in Akron and also took place Friday at Artha Woods Park in Cleveland. In Akron, festival organizers received 60 guns seized off the streets and donated by the Akron Police Department. The guns were then taken apart, the wood components separated from the metal, and shipped off to their next destination. As a result, no live or functional weapons will be present.
Douglas Wurtz, the founder of Akron Cooperative Farms, told the Akron Beacon Journal that the garden is the perfect place to start.
“This is where we build communities, change hearts,” Wurtz said. “These guns were used for evil, and now we are going to turn them around and use them for good.”
What is the Festival of Nonviolence and Peacemaking
Bryson Dabis, who serves as the director of the Akron Leadership Foundation, said the symbolic ceremony is taken in part from Biblical passages prophesizing the end of all war. The Old Testament book of Isaiah describes the beating of swords into ploughshares and spears into pruninghooks, symbolism realized with a modern twist by RAWtools.
“It’s the transformation of metal crafted to do harm into tools meant to cultivate life,” Dabis said. “It’s a way we can redeem these tools and their stories to bring peace to our communities.”
Darin Nissley, who serves as the director of Lighthouse Ministries in Canton, said the means by which the weapons were acquired is significant.
“When a trigger is pulled that takes a life, something is broken,” Nissley said. “The idea of stepping into broken spaces to redeem them is beautiful, and these guns have been acquired from some such broken situations.”
Dabis said the festival speaks to a push toward a new means of solving problems in society.
“So often in our country we resolve violence with violence, but we can transform this narrative by meeting it instead with powerful peace,” Dabis said.
‘A growing movement of people ready to act’
The Canton leg of the event is sponsored dominantly by Canton For All People, Lighthouse Ministries in Canton, Pax Christi USA and the Stark County Prosecutor’s Office. Nissley said he is seeing a surge of nonviolent advocacy.
“There’s a new coalition forming around peacemaking and all of these groups are very active right now trying to build towards nonviolent solutions,” Nissley said. “It’s a growing movement of people ready to act, ready to bring Scripture to life, and I think that’s beautiful.”
Nissley said all groups involved in the event bring a new avenue of discussion to the table on the issue of violence in Northeast Ohio. He said Claiborne coming to Canton resonated with him due to Lighthouse’s heritage and mission. Lighthouse was founded by the First Mennonite Church, which Nissley described as a traditional peace church.
“Since the very beginning, Lighthouse’s mission has been to help teach youth nonviolent solutions to the problems in their lives and communities,” Nissley said. “I especially like RAWtools’ swords-to-ploughshares ceremony. Lighthouse has a lot of artwork dedicated to nonviolence, including a cable decoration made of bullets with a similar message.”
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Dismantled guns to be smelted into gardening tools at Sunday festival
