I turn guns into garden tools. We need more options for destroying firearms

It’s easier to get a gun in America than it is to get rid of a gun.

Between 2019 and 2021, Philadelphia organized more than 34 buyback events. But despite all that effort, Philadelphia recovered just over 1,000 firearms, none of which had been used in a crime.

What’s worse: A recent report from CBS News, the Trace, and Mother Jones found that police departments across the country have sold more than 87,000 firearms that had been used in the line of duty. And more than half of those resold weapons have ended up being later used in crimes.

In Philadelphia, for instance, the report found that the police department has resold nearly 900 guns over the last 20 years, including 85 between 2021 and 2022.

This should be unthinkable — can you imagine if police sold the heroin seized in a drug bust? But alas, I fear that too many of the gun buybacks that we organize around the country become “gun sellbacks” by police.

I’ve been a Philadelphia-based organizer for over two decades, and most recently have been concentrating on gun violence, as the founder of RAWtools Philly, which turns guns into garden tools.

One family I met had just moved to Philadelphia, and had a family member who thought they needed an assault rifle, so he bought one and had it delivered to their house. It was literally dropped off on the porch, and they had no idea it was coming. They Googled “How to get rid of a gun” and it pulled up us at RAWtools. I made them a piece of art for their kid’s room from the AR-15.

But it’s not as easy as it should be to get rid of a gun. And the “blue market” — made up of the police who resell the guns they have — is not making things better.

In Georgia, I helped organize a gun buyback with authorities, where the police told us that state law mandated they sell all guns that were turned in. I thought I misunderstood, so I asked if we could help cover any expenses related to destroying the guns. The police said they are not allowed to destroy the guns, only resell them.

» READ MORE: Gun buybacks don’t cut crime. Here is what might.

Several other states have laws mandating police to sell seized guns or trade in their own when buying new ones. North Carolina is one of them, and they are running out of space for the piles of guns in their arsenal.

One North Carolina police chief, Patrice Andrews in Durham, told WRAL-TV in Raleigh in 2022 that she had to lease a 20,000-square-foot warehouse to store the 10,000 guns they have possession of, many of which are no longer needed for evidence in court but are not allowed to be destroyed.

Even when states and municipalities permit the destruction of firearms by authorities, it may not happen. Last December, the New York Times reported that Gunbusters, a company that contracts with local agencies to destroy firearms, was merely disassembling the guns, destroying one part, and selling the rest of the parts for profit. The company has collected about 200,000 firearms from authorities across America in the past decade, and is making about $90,000 a week on the sale of parts, in addition to fees paid by governments and law enforcement agencies.

It’s not as easy as it should be to get rid of a gun.

Here in Philadelphia, the District Attorney’s Office worked with researcher David Blake Johnson to aggregate disturbing data from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office and Pennsylvania State Police showing that 165,717 guns have been seized by law enforcement in the state over the last two decades.

That means that there are thousands of Philadelphia guns that need to be destroyed. We know that Philadelphia officers have sold confiscated firearms, both legally and illegally. We even saw one sheriff’s deputy arrested for selling guns to an FBI informant, including two used in the shooting at Roxborough High School in 2022.

We must demand that Philadelphia destroy all surrendered and confiscated guns on the spot.

Last month, I teamed up with Philadelphia Mural Arts and hosted events around the city where we brought our mobile gun-chopping trailer and portable forge so that we could chop guns and turn them into garden tools in different neighborhoods impacted by gun violence. We offered “Groceries for Guns” — $250 food credit for each donated gun. It has been so effective, we are going to keep it going throughout the year, ultimately installing pieces of public art that incorporate chopped-up Philadelphia guns in the artwork.

The United States already has more guns than people, and we’re producing more and more of them every year — more than 10 million, in fact. Our goal is simply to get rid of unwanted guns to make sure they cannot be misused.

A man in Philadelphia lost his wife to suicide, and called RAWtools Philly hoping that we could destroy the gun she used. I contacted the detective involved in the case, who listened intently and asked good questions. He seemed very interested in the reasonable request of this grieving widower. The detective ran it through the ranks, and eventually brought the firearm into the shop, where we destroyed it. Once he got here, the gun was gone in about five minutes.

We need a new process in Philadelphia and around the country to decommission — and destroy — guns.

When police resell guns, they are not making anyone safer. Guns are killing us at the rate of 120 lives a day, over 40,000 lives per year. In my lifetime, we’ve lost more lives to guns in America than the combined deaths of all the lives lost in war throughout U.S. history. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Every time we turn a gun into a garden tool we are declaring that all things can be made new. Metal that has been crafted to kill can be reimagined and repurposed. And what is true of metal is also true of policies.

Shane Claiborne is a speaker, activist, and best-selling author, and recently coauthored the book ”Beating Guns,” about the RAWtools network.