Beating Guns

by Shane Claiborne

  In fact, an overwhelming majority of gun owners are concerned about gun violence. They aren’t necessarily the loudest voices in the NRA, but they are by far the majority. That’s good news, and it is also critical to remember. This book is not about demonizing gun owners. It is about saving lives and working with everyone who is committed to that.

  For those of you who are pastoring churches, issues like this one require a special sort of grace and patience—and courage and wisdom and prayer. We want to encourage you to see this as a moral, spiritual, pro-life issue. Pro-life does not mean just antiabortion. It means standing against death in all its ugly forms and becoming a champion of life consistently, across the board. Stopping gun violence is a pro-life issue.

  There are those who say, “We do not have a gun problem; we have a heart problem.” We would make a slight change: we have a gun problem and a heart problem.

  So let’s gather around a table. But it’s not an ordinary table; it’s the top of an anvil. And that oven over there isn’t baking bread; it’s baking gunmetal. Gather round, all you who are weary, you who are wounded, you who are cynical and angry, you who have much faith and you who would like to have more, you who have tried to follow Jesus and you who have failed. Gather round the forge, and let’s dream of a world where weapons become garden tools and where cold hearts are brought back to life again.

  One

  Turning Weapons into Farm Tools (and Other Lovely Things)

  God will judge between the nations,

  and settle disputes of mighty nations.

  Then they will beat their swords into iron plows

  and their spears into pruning tools.

  Nation will not take up sword against nation;

  they will no longer learn how to make war.

  —Isaiah 2:4 (CEB)

  THERE’S THIS THING about turning guns into garden tools. You have to add some heat—a little more than two thousand degrees of controlled flame. If it’s too hot, the steel melts or burns off. If it’s too cold, the steel cracks under the hammer. There is a happy medium range of heat where the magic happens—where transformation takes place—and it’s a beautiful glowing orange. The steel feels like thick clay when the hammer makes contact, and it cools as you work on the anvil. As the orange glow fades, the steel hardens into its new form. But you can’t make a tool in just one “heat.” You have to repeat the process. You put the gun barrel back into the forge and bring it out to shape it some more. Then again. And again. You repeat that cycle over and over using various tools designed to make the gun barrel into a garden tool. The heat brings transformation. Steel is literally shaping steel.

  Forging peace [Coe Burchfield]

  How much did the prophets Micah (4:3) and Isaiah know about blacksmithing when they both called their audiences to transform the metal tools of death into the tools of life, to beat swords into plows and spears into pruning hooks? We don’t know if they had spent much time at the forge, but they surely knew heat is required. Fire refines; it burns away impurities. Our deepest growth often comes as we rise from crisis or trauma or a heated moment in our lives. The prophets knew that with a little holy fire metal can be reshaped—and so can people. They knew weapons that kill can be transformed—and so can people who kill. The prophets of old were not so much fortune-tellers as they were provocateurs of the imagination. They weren’t trying to predict the future. They were trying to change the present. They invite us to dream of the world as it could be and not just accept the world as it is. That takes faith.

  Both Micah and Isaiah tell of this holy movement where God’s people turn from death to life and transform their weapons into garden tools. And the prophets go on to say that, in the end, nation will not rise up against nation; the world will no longer learn to make war (Isa. 2:4). We are offered a vision of a world free from violence and bombs and guns and drones and all the ugly stuff of death.

  According to the prophets, though, peace does not begin with kings or presidents or heads of state. They’re the ones who keep creating the wars. Peace begins with “the people.” It is not politicians who lead the way to peace; it is the people of God who lead the politicians to peace. Peace begins with the people of God, who refuse to kill and who insist on beating their weapons into farm tools. The prophecy ends with the vision of a world free of violence, but it begins with us.

  It is people with prophetic imagination who will become the conscience of our world and lead the politicians and presidents and kings to turn from war and stand on the side of life. We will make violence extinct by refusing to kill.

  Might it be that we are the people that we have been waiting for?

  Some will say we are idealists if we talk of peace in a world of war. But faith is about believing in what we hope for and about being certain of what we do not yet see (Heb. 11:1). Faith is all about not letting the current reality hijack the future. Faith refuses to accept the world as it is and insists on moving the world toward what it should be.

  We can’t wait on politicians to change the world.

  We have the audacity to believe that it is not the will of God for approximately 105 people to die from guns each day in the United States.1 The world doesn’t have to be this way. And we can begin by telling the truth about the world as it is now and reimagining how this world could be a better, safer, and more beautiful place. We can begin reimagining our world by telling the stories of deep lament, of lives lost. Then, through the prophetic hope that we have, we can transform metal—and the world. Hope makes us live differently, unsatisfied with the way things are, and it gives us the audacity to believe they can be different.

  Photos and stories are scattered throughout this book. Let them stir a different part of your brain and your heart. We will not change the world with facts alone. Or words alone.

  Eventually we’ve got to pick up the hammer and put words into action.

  Forging Life

  It’s been said that you can count the number of seeds in an apple but you can’t count the number of apples in a seed. We live in a world of abundant life, where one apple can produce hundreds of offspring. But the same may be true of bullets—they do not kill just one person. A bullet can destroy an entire family, community, or neighborhood. A bullet can produce many more bullets as the spiral of violence escalates, as conflict begets conflict, as wars beget wars, as hatred produces more hatred. And any time a person is killed, the person who did the killing can feel something in them die as well. We were not made to kill, and when we do, something in us dies. We were made to love and be loved, to cultivate life, not death. So we need to discover how to live on the side of life again. Death, as we will see, is one of the first things that came after the fall of Adam and Eve way back in the garden of Eden.

  The call to turn swords into plows is as much about transforming our way of life as it is about transforming a gun into a garden tool.

  On the front door at The Simple Way, the faith community Shane and friends have been building on the north side of Philadelphia for over twenty years, there is a prayer that God would heal all that is broken—in our hearts, in our streets, and in our world. We have a God who is healing individuals. But God is also healing the world and wants us to be a part of the action.

  We want to live in a way that moves the world toward love and away from fear. We want to live in patterns that generate life rather than exploit it, that see people and creatures as precious instead of disposable.

  The front door at The Simple Way [The Simple Way]

  The hard thing about transforming a life, like transforming metal, is that it requires work, sweat, heat, and constant attention. There’s a beautiful Scripture that says, “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). Salvation is a movement, not just a moment. Transformation is a process. This is the paradox of waiting for the steel to reheat. You know that transformation is coming, even though it may feel like you are taking a pounding, but you are also thankful for the rest that you a
re given while you reheat in the fire. And then as you are being healed, you become a healing presence in this broken world.

  In that same passage about beating swords into plows, the prophet Micah offers another image, this time of a vine and a fig tree. He says, “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid” (Mic. 4:4).

  Can you imagine that? A world where people have enough food and live without fear? What does it look like to move from a world of scarcity and violence into this vine-and-fig-tree world the prophets speak of?

  Fig tree [Wikimedia]

  A fig tree can take two to six years from when it was planted to produce fruit. What’s fascinating is that trees mature at their own pace. Some trees bud younger and some older, just like people. This long juvenile period often tempts humans to speed up the process by overfertilizing or overwatering. In a world where we can buy Fig Newtons at the local grocery store, we would need a whole new level of patience to wait for a fresh fig off a branch. Turning swords into plows takes patience. You can’t stick a sword in a microwave for two minutes (or until golden brown) and pull out a plow. We need patience with each other as our cold hearts are being transformed into hearts that beat with life and love and hope again.

  GOD’S DREAM FOR THE WORLD

  Everyone will sit under their own vine

  and under their own fig tree,

  and no one will make them afraid,

  for the LORD Almighty has spoken. (Mic. 4:4)

  And communities take time to transform. One of our mentors is Dr. John Perkins, who’s almost ninety years old. At one point, I (Shane) was explaining to him that I was growing impatient because our neighborhood was not changing as quickly as I wished it would. We had been working tirelessly for almost five years, and folks were still getting shot on our corners and overdosing on our sidewalks. Dr. Perkins said, “Be patient, my brother. You will see things begin to change and transform, but it may take another ten years.”

  Sometimes we are tempted to turn up the heat on the forge to make things move a little faster. But that only means we run the risk of burning off the metal from too much heat. God’s grace moves slow and steady. We live in a world that wants everything to happen in an instant: fast food, quick money from the ATM, movies on demand, news at our fingertips. But the stuff that really gives life takes time. A baby takes nine months. A good meal doesn’t come in three minutes. It takes time to learn a new skill or language. And lives that are beautiful take time to produce, just like any work of art. You begin to wonder if guns are our default because they seem like a quick and easy answer in the short term. They give us access to immediate power and force. But violence is often the instrument of those who are impatient, those who lack imagination, those who cannot wait on justice or freedom or redemption.

  Memorial to the Lost

  MARJORY STONEMAN DOUGLAS HIGH SCHOOL, PARKLAND, FLORIDA (FEBRUARY 14, 2018)

  On February 14, 2018, seventeen students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, were fatally shot, and seventeen others were wounded. Witnesses identified the assailant as a nineteen-year-old former student. The weapon used was an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle. Here are the names of those who died.

  Alyssa Alhadeff, 14 Gina Montalto, 14

  Scott Beigel, 35 Joaquin Oliver, 17

  Martin Duque, 14 Alaina Petty, 14

  Nicholas Dworet, 17 Meadow Pollack, 18

  Aaron Feis, 37 Helena Ramsay, 17

  Jaime Guttenberg, 14 Alex Schachter, 14

  Chris Hixon, 49 Carmen Schentrup, 16

  Luke Hoyer, 15 Peter Wong, 15

  Cara Loughran, 14

  Turning swords into plows reorients how we do life. We move from instant gratification to seasonal patience.

  The fact that something can be made new is a miracle. Caterpillars to butterflies, weapons to tools, sinners to saints. The old is gone, the new has come. Nothing is beyond redemption. In Philadelphia, we’ve turned old tires, televisions, and computer monitors into garden planters. We’ve made sunflowers out of hubcaps and turned one ugly wall after another into a piece of art. Transformation is magical. When we turn guns into garden tools, we turn fear into feasts. When we no longer train to annihilate fear, we train to face it. When we don’t train for war, we train for transformation. When we begin to turn our swords into plows, we experience a paradox of vulnerability and opportunity. Each dip into the fiery heat of the forge brings us closer to the vine and fig tree.

  One of the profound things about making a garden tool is that it is hard to do alone. Many of the important steps require two sets of hands. When you punch a hole for the handle, you need at least three or four hands—one for the hammer, one for the punch, and one or two to hold the tongs with the heated metal. This process can’t happen alone. Another lesson from the forge: we are not meant to do life alone. Jesus sent the disciples out in pairs and elsewhere promised that “where two or three gather,” he would be with us (Matt. 18:20). We are created in the image of God, who reflects community to us—Father, Son, Spirit. We are made to do life together. If you want to be a help in your community, you need to allow your community to speak into your life, and you need to be vulnerable to those around you. As iron sharpens iron, so we sharpen one another (Prov. 27:17).

  In our heated, raw vulnerability, it’s not uncommon to be formed by a hammer held by an enemy, a punch held by a friend, and tongs held by our community. When we invite people who don’t think, act, or look like us into the process, we allow transformation to take root. We start that seasonal process toward a vine and fig tree.

  Gathered around the forge in Toledo [Dan Brearley / The Simple Way]

  Transformation requires tools—whether we are talking about changing swords to plows or about ourselves being made into new persons. When we repurpose metal, we trade some of our old tools in for new ones. In America, this means trading the Second Amendment for the Sermon on the Mount. Romans 12:2 says we are not to conform to this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds—new hearts, new minds, new eyes to see the world. That’s what God is up to in the great project of transforming the world. Transformation begins inside each of us.

  It takes faith to believe that something (or someone) can be different from what it is now or that the world can be different than it is right now. Faith is all about believing despite the evidence we currently see—and watching the evidence change. Before every major social movement that has changed the world, people said, “That is impossible.” And after every social movement that has changed the world, people say, “That was inevitable.”

  So it is with the movement to turn a world from weapons to garden tools. It is about believing in a God who is transforming death into life and inviting us to participate, daring us to stand on the side of life.

  Transformation requires hope—and hope changes the one who hopes. Think about a pregnant mother. She doesn’t just passively wait for the baby. She waits actively. She prepares. She gets the crib ready, prepares the room, eats healthy, sleeps well. And so it is with those of us who want to be midwives of a new and better world.

  If we believe swords are going to be converted to plows, it makes less and less sense to keep making swords. If we really believe the prophets were right and that this is what is coming, then we can’t help but begin enacting it now. We adjust our lives now to get ready for the future that we know is coming.

  Other Lovely Things

  Let’s not limit what we make out of a gun to garden tools alone. As you will soon see, when we at RAWtools started transforming guns into plows, we began getting images from folks all over the world who were likewise inspired by the idea of turning swords into plows. There were guitars made out of handguns, and saxophones out of semiautomatics. We’ve had folks send images from Iraq of guns being crushed in the streets. We’ve seen enormous pieces of public art made from melted guns, and we’ve seen folks make Christmas ornaments out of tear-gas ca
nisters.

  Peace feather made from various gun components

  On Halloween in 2015, a Colorado Springs man used an assault rifle to kill three people and then later died in a shootout with police. One year later, a silent walk was organized by local residents that followed the path of the shooter to reclaim the neighborhood as their space and not the space of a shooting.2 The walk ended at a church, where a feather was passed around a circle of about one hundred people. Native Americans have a practice of using a feather as a talking piece in mediation circles. Whoever is holding the feather has the right to speak their truth. Whoever held that feather was invited to share how gun violence affects them. It didn’t matter what side of the gun-violence issue someone fell on, they were welcome to share how their life has been changed since that shooting.

  Epitaph (2014), shotgun, aluminum (found cans), soot, steel [Paul Villinski]

  The feather being passed didn’t come from a bird. RAWtools made a spine from the spring in an AK-47 magazine; the rubber grip of a revolver was sliced and formed the shape of the feather; a spent bullet casing was used to seat the spine of the feather. This feather and others like it continue to be used by restorative-justice facilitators in Colorado.

  Many lovely things can be formed from a gun. Even gun enthusiasts make artistic and functional pieces from gun parts (though probably not from perfectly functioning guns). Changing swords to plows requires us to open our imagination to what we can make of our guns. Instead of dreaming of bigger, faster, more technologically advanced weapons, we can imagine a world of plowshares that points both toward a vine and fig tree and toward the past we came from. This is why art is so important. Imagine what we could make from a tank.

  Mourn (2014), handgun, aluminum (found can), soot, steel [Paul Villinski]