by Matt Willingham
“He shall judge between many peoples… and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Micah 4:3
“That passage, the part about turning swords into plowshares, I think about it a lot. It’s become so important to me,” shared Mike Martin.
As a former Menonite pastor, nonviolence and peacemaking has always been important to Mike, but it was after schoolchildren were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary that Mike and a group of friends decided to launch RAWtools.
“RAWtools is basically doing what that verse in Micah said: we receive firearms, disable them, and can turn them into works of art or garden tools, depending on the situation. Raw is ‘War’ backwards, as we reverse tools of war, but it also speaks to the rawness and vulnerability of nonviolence. My friend, Shane Claiborne, first took a donated AK-47, cut it in half, and made it into a rake and a shovel. An AK-47 was also the first gun donated to RAWtools, and we’ve been doing this kind of work ever since.”
In the wake of yet another mass shooting—this one at an elementary school in Uvalde, TX—many US Americans feel hopeless. How many times does this have to happen before something changes and what, exactly, needs to change? In our division, it feels almost impossible to agree on meaningful action, but Mike believes transformation can happen—but it will take time.
“It feels like we have momentum after Uvalde, but we thought the same thing after other shootings and still haven’t seen legislation. People have to realize just how influential the culture and marketing around firearms can be. Actually, parents of Sandy Hook recently won a lawsuit against a gun manufacturer that was marketing their firearms in a ‘manly, machismo way’ to young men. Then consider that only 5% of gun owners are NRA members, but they have an outsized impact on the conversation.”
The gradual nature of everyday peacemaking work can feel so slow, but Mike insists that the conversation and culture around firearms is shifting.
“That first donor who gave an AK-47 to be cut and crafted into garden tools still had plenty of guns, but on the 5th anniversary of Sandy Hook he donated his handguns as well.
Ultimately, this process will take time and daily work, but if we’re willing to have conversations about how we want to live together as family, neighbors, and community, we will see lifesaving change.
MICHAEL MARTIN is founder and executive director of RAWtools Inc. and blogs at RAWtools.org. RAWtools turns guns into garden tools (and other lovely things), resourcing communities with nonviolent confrontation skills in an effort to turn stories of violence into stories of creation.