With the aim of reducing gun deaths, ‘Guns to Gardens’ gives unwanted firearms a new purpose

"Organizations around the country are finding a way to help make their communities safer through national, grassroots movements like safe storage campaigns, and another called Guns to Gardens." (Ethan Miller | Getty images)

Many people are rethinking the wisdom of having firearms in their homes.

For nearly three decades, the Dickey Amendment promoted by the NRA stymied research into gun deaths and injury by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific research organizations. Only recently is the CDC once again permitted to collect and share data and do research on gun violence. In that interval, research paid for by the NRA proliferated. Americans were bombarded with the false message that a gun in the home is protective.

What unbiased research is showing is that we are not safer with a gun in our homes. A Stanford Medicine longitudinal research study in 2020 found owning a handgun is associated with a dramatically elevated risk of suicide. The Annals of Internal Medicine reported in 2022 that people living in homes with firearms have higher risks of dying by homicide. Meanwhile, firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teens. The failure to adequately secure firearms in homes contributes to this; 75 percent of children who live in homes with guns know where they are stored and 22 percent report having handled them, without parent knowledge.

Firearms in our homes do not make our families safer.

As our legislators have been slow to respond to these facts, organizations around the country are finding a way to help make their communities safer through national, grassroots movements like safe storage campaigns, and another called Guns to Gardens, an effort to reduce the number of unwanted guns – and thereby gun deaths – in our communities.

You may be surprised to learn that in New Hampshire, law enforcement agencies are prohibited from operating a firearms voluntary surrender and destroy program (RSA 159:25). If you give your gun to local or state police, they may use it in their own police work, or put it back into circulation through public auction.

In June 2023, GunSense NH and other members of the N.H. Gun Violence Prevention Coalition hosted the first-ever “Guns to Gardens” event in New Hampshire to assist Granite Staters in safely disposing of their unwanted guns. Using Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) guidelines, volunteers chopped the firearms into pieces leaving only scrap metal and wood. There were 31 guns dismantled during the first event, including an AR-15 rifle and five handguns.

One participant, an Army marksman veteran, said, “Six, seven years ago I bought this rifle just for target practice, and with everything that’s been going on I just wanted to get rid of it.” He tried to give it to New Hampshire State Police and the ATF, with no luck. On his truck he had a bumper sticker which read, “Protect Kids, Not Guns.” He drove over 60 miles to bring that AR-15 to the event, and expressed gratitude for the work our volunteers were doing.

The scrap metal and wood from the guns brought to the June 2023 event have been transformed by Sword to Ploughshares Northeast and local artists into gardening tools, heart pendant necklaces, wooden bowls, wooden spoons, and a stunning necklace made from bits and pieces of the dismantled guns.

This weekend, New Hampshire Guns to Gardens will once again provide Granite Staters the opportunity to safely dispose of unwanted firearms without putting them back into circulation. The event will take place on Saturday, June 8, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the parking lot of Wesley United Methodist Church, 79 Clinton Street, in Concord. Community members are encouraged to bring their unwanted, unloaded firearms in the rear of their vehicle to be chopped up and later transformed into beautiful and useful art and garden tools.

This year we will be offering $25 gas gift cards to the first 30 participants as a way of saying “thank you” and helping to defray the cost of driving to the event. Gun locks will also be available for those with other firearms at home still.

Guns to Gardens is hosted by GunSense NH, a project of Granite State Progress and Engage New Hampshire, the N.H. Council of Churches, Kent Street Coalition, the N.H. Conference of United Church of Christ, and the Greater Concord Interfaith Council, with generous support from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation Gilly Fund.

We encourage readers to spread the word about both Guns to Gardens and safe storage. We can do something about gun violence. Each gun brought to the event or safely stored means one less gun that could be discovered by an inquisitive child, or stolen and used in a crime, or readily available to someone suffering a mental health crisis. We can make our families and communities safer – one gun at a time.

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