Abi writes…
When I spoke to Mike Martin in December last year, he had spent the morning in a Mennonite parking lot cutting up a handgun, a rifle and an AR-15 and turning them into garden tools.
Mike set up RAWtools after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2012, where 20 children and 6 adults were killed in Connecticut. “It came out of the scripture of swords in ploughshares,” Mike shares, “figuring out a modern way to make that relevant. Not just to turn guns into garden tools, but to use that as an entry point to alternative conflict resolution skills.” Already a Mennonite pastor, he retrained as a blacksmith to bring the Bible passage to life again.
Mike wants to centre the people whose lives have been affected by gun violence, giving them opportunities to share their stories at community events and to be the first to take up blacksmithing tools and begin the process of turning a gun into a garden tool in front of the community. Everyone else is then invited to join in. “It honours their story and connects that it takes a community effort if we are going to have an impact on ending gun violence in the United States.”
Around half of the firearms they receive were used in a suicide, as law enforcement usually return the gun to the family. Mike says, “Sometimes we make a tool out of it that they feel honours their loved one. Sometimes they just want it destroyed, and that is meaningful and important to them.”
In the US one gun is manufactured every three seconds. I asked him for his views on gun manufacturers, he paused before answering. “I think that they are responsible in many ways: their marketing, and how they tell us we need this type of gun, or this accessory, to help protect ourselves better. I think this fear component in their marketing is really damning in the work to end gun violence. So much so, if you don’t own a firearm to protect your family and your family gets hurt, then it is your fault. Their marketing is so fear driven, to the point that it has convinced us that we don’t hold the person who caused harm accountable – instead we are holding the person who could prevent that harm responsible. That really needs to be turned around, onto gun manufacturers.”
On average, RAWtools can make three tools from each gun they are handed. And if they sell those tools, they always sell for more than the gun was worth. Mike remarks, “Our communities value what we are making from these guns, way more than they value these guns.”
Another motivation for RAWtools was the example set by Charlotte Evans. Twenty-five years ago, her three-year-old son was killed by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting. She was the first person in Colorado to go through a “high-impact dialogue”, speaking to the young man who pulled the trigger; he was just 15 or 16 years old at the time of the shooting. This form of restorative justice has proved so much more effective than the traditional legal system, giving those who have been harmed by gun violence a way forward and an opportunity to heal.
For Mike, a lot of restorative justice work is simple, rooted in indiginous practices like talking circles – giving people a safe space to speak and be heard. For Mike, it feels a similar experience to blacksmithing, an accessible way for communities to learn and make change, to navigate conflict in a healthy way and prevent escalation to gun violence. He argues that there are a lot of lines that have been crossed, resources that people were unaware of and cries for help that have been ignored, before someone turns to gun violence: “We are complicated people and we need to help each other in this process. The rugged individualism at the heart of gun culture is not the way forward.”
You can hear the full interview on the Hopeful Activists’ Podcast here. Mike’s interview starts at 48’20.