The Trajectory
A newsletter looking at existing and emerging responses to America’s gun violence crisis.
May 26, 2026
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A Faith-Based Movement Is Destroying Guns — And Turning Them Into Gardening Tools
Guns to Gardens has repurposed more than 13,000 firearms. For some gun owners, these church-hosted safe disposal events offer an opportunity for healing.
By Alma Beauvais
Hannah Jensen and her husband, Adam, look on as a volunteer cuts apart her father’s Colt Anaconda during a Guns To Gardens event on December 14, 2024. The firearm will later be transformed into a gardening tool. Courtesy of Guns to Gardens Metro Denver
Hannah Jensen woke up feeling apprehensive. It was a cold December morning in Denver, and she had something significant ahead of her. She and her husband drove north to Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church in Northglenn. There was no worship service that Saturday, but the parking lot was busy with volunteers in yellow safety vests guiding cars through checkpoints. In the trunk of Jensen’s car were three of the four guns her father had owned. She carried a framed photo of him, the man who taught her to love the mountains.
Jensen’s 59-year-old father had died by suicide seven months earlier, in May 2024, after a severe depressive episode following a quadruple bypass heart surgery. His fourth gun, the one he had used to end his life, was taken by the police. Jensen still doesn’t know what happened to it, whether it is still at the sheriff’s office or it’s floating elsewhere in the world. The guns in her trunk, though, were her responsibility — and her chance to do something meaningful.
“Being vulnerable about what you've gone through can be uncomfortable,” Jensen said. “I was nervous for that, but I was confident that it was going to be an important and memorable day.”
She turned the three firearms over to trained volunteers, who checked to make sure that they weren’t loaded. She and her husband watched in silence as the guns were clamped to a table, cut apart, and transformed into a pick mattock — a hand tool for loosening soil and making way for new roots.
“Taking something destructive and something that is a part of the most painful thing I've ever been through, and seeing that first step of it turning into something that is meant to sow new life and bring beauty and growth into the world felt very cathartic,” Jensen said. She remembered how one of her father’s revolvers resisted the blade, as sparks flew from under the chop saw. It took much longer to cut than most weapons at the Guns to Gardens event that day.
Clockwise from top left: Hannah Jensen and her husband, Adam, look on as one of her father’s donated guns, a Colt Anaconda, is cut apart on December 14, 2024 (courtesy of Guns to Gardens Metro Denver); a framed photo of Hannah Jensen’s father and two examples of garden tools made from gun parts (courtesy of Guns to Gardens Metro Denver); “The Lord's Supper,” an art piece made using donated guns (courtesy of Presbyterian Peace Fellowship).
Guns to Gardens has been turning unwanted firearms into garden tools and art for over a decade. Since 2013, this faith-based safe disposal movement has destroyed and repurposed an estimated 13,000-plus guns across the country.
Mike Martin, a Mennonite youth pastor in Colorado Springs, launched Guns to Gardens after the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut, which left 20 young children and six adults dead and two people injured. Martin was seeking a way to cope, and he was inspired by a biblical phrase in Isaiah 2:4: “beat swords into plowshares.” He felt a calling.
“It's really hard to get rid of a gun if you don't want to just sell it or pawn it off,” Martin said. “There aren't very many options out there.”
Martin learned blacksmithing and founded RAWTools, a national nonprofit that offers people a way to get rid of unwanted guns without returning them to the market or risking them being stolen or accessed by children or people who may be a danger to themselves or others. It was the progenitor of the larger Guns to Gardens movement.
“We need to figure out ways to handle conflict without violence, so that's the basis behind RAWTools,” Martin told me. “Raw is war backward, so exchanging tools of violence for tools of creation and generation.”
RAWtools started as a private, by-appointment initiative. From 2013 to 2020, it destroyed between 300 and 400 firearms, Martin said.
Guns to Gardens rapidly gained momentum after the 2021 mass shooting at a King Soopers in Boulder, which claimed 10 lives. With Martin involved, the Community United Church of Christ down the block from the grocery store organized the first Guns to Gardens event as a community healing effort. The church collected dozens of weapons over three hours. Donors received thank-you gift cards ranging from $100 to $300.
Guns to Gardens has since grown into a nationwide network with hundreds of volunteers — including blacksmiths, woodworkers, and artists — participating in annual church-organized events across more than 25 states, supported by the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship's Action Circles. Attendees and volunteers at these safe surrender events include gun owners, people directly affected by gun violence, and veterans.
Each event collects anywhere from a handful to hundreds of firearms. Unlike Jensen, who was also a Guns to Gardens volunteer and made a special request to RAWTools, gun owners don’t typically get a finished product right away. The parts are usually given to local artists or the blacksmith network, who make garden tools, art, jewelry, and other items to raise awareness about gun violence prevention. If they want, donors can purchase art pieces or garden tools online..
“Once we started doing these events, the amount of firearms we destroyed doubled for three years in a row, and it continues to grow,” Martin said.
Although similar to traditional gun buybacks, which are often led by police or city governments, Guns to Gardens events allow gun owners to retain legal ownership throughout the process and offer owners the opportunity to share their personal stories about the guns with the volunteers. And unlike guns given to police, there’s no question that firearms collected at these events are permanently removed from circulation.
There is limited empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of gun buybacks. Most of the existing research focuses on governmental buybacks, and it suggests that those programs are generally ineffective at reducing gun violence.
“We don't know if these buybacks are really getting to the guns that are actually going to go out and hurt somebody,” said Stephanie Bonne, a trauma surgeon at Advocate Christ Medical Center who has researched community-based programming for gun violence prevention, including gun buybacks. “Most of the guns that are returned are broken, had been sitting in a basement.”
Overall, researchers say that given the sheer number of guns in circulation, it’s hard for community-led programs like Guns to Gardens to make a big dent. However, Bonne noted that some research indicates these programs can help reduce local gun circulation. There’s another aspect, too: Initiatives like Guns to Gardens serve as promising strategies for community engagement, and for gun safety and safe storage education.
Maureen Berner, a professor of public administration and government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said these other types of impact outcomes are harder to document but are worthwhile.
“It's harder to define and measure an overall positive level of awareness in a community,” she said. “There's also the larger social issue of healing — a much more personal impact beyond the immediate physical harm — that these programs are having. Those effects are less tangible but just as important.”
Left: Signage at the first Guns to Gardens public event at the Community United Church of Christ of Boulder in 2021 (courtesy of the Community United Church of Christ of Boulder). Right: Hannah Jensen, a volunteer who donated her father’s guns after he died by suicide, holds a Guns to Gardens information sheet (courtesy of Guns to Gardens Metro Denver).
Guns to Gardens participants relinquish their guns for various reasons, including inheritance of firearms they don’t want and the loss of a loved one. Some donors come for the same reason the movement began: to mourn and seek healing after mass shootings.
Many people come for the same reason Jensen did. At least one person who has lost a loved one to suicide contacts RAWtools every month . That reflects a tragic reality: Gun suicides make up more than halfof all gun deaths.
“The more we work with survivors or people who don't want a firearm in their home, the more we see the value and the healing and curbing of anxiety, and just living a life without fear of a firearm in the home is really transformative for a lot of people,” Martin said.
The connection to faith is an important part of how Guns to Gardens helps people heal, Martin said. Churches hold a unique position in their communities. They’re often in direct contact with people affected by gun violence, and importantly, they have established trust with community members — something that police departments don’t always have. Jan Orr-Harter, who moderates the Action Circles, framed it starkly: “We do the funerals.”
“We know that this process of transforming can be very healing for gun violence survivors and their families,” Orr-Harter told me. “Our goal is to provide that service as congregations, just like we provide many other services like preschools, homeless outreach centers, and youth groups.”
For Jensen, Guns to Gardens felt like redemption. She knew she wanted to transform her father’s firearms since the week he died, she told me.
“There are a lot of people who, like me, don't want the weapon in our home and want it destroyed,” Jensen said. “That is the resolution a lot of people are hoping for with those weapons. So it's really a beautiful community service that Guns to Gardens offers.”
That December morning at Good Shepherd, Guns to Gardens volunteers destroyed 18 unwanted weapons. That year, the group safely dismantled and transformed 572 firearms.
Jensen said that although getting rid of one or two guns is small in the grand scheme of things, it is still emotionally significant.
“Just knowing that there's one less weapon in circulation feels so small, like a drop in the ocean, but it feels powerful knowing I'm doing what's in my power to affect that,” she said.
Jensen, now 29, moved to Bend, Oregon, one month after surrendering her father’s guns. She found a church that aligns with her faith and has begun hosting safe gun-disposal events in her new community. Today, the garden tool made from her dad’s guns sits on the mantel above her fireplace. Her new home lacks a garden, but she hopes she can one day use it to help something grow.