PEACEMAKER: From Guns to Garden Tools

Join RAWtools, The Peace Pastor Marty Troyer, Texas Gun Sense and others on Friday, March 10th at 6:45pm as we turn guns into garden tools and learn of a 3rd way of addressing gun violence.

RAWtools, Inc. gets its scriptural motivation from Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3. We want to be comprehensive in our efforts to move our communities away from gun violence and violence as a whole. Its not enough to just make a lot of tools from guns. We need to help teach each other new ways to solve our problems through relationship, dialogue, and alternative means of justice, i.e. Restorative Justice practices and victim-offender dialogue.

Our nation has been through a variety of horrific events surrounding gun violence and it has brought the conversation to the forefront of our current events and “water cooler” conversations. It has largely become a binary conversation of either more guns or more laws. RAWtools wants to open a new option, a third way. What if we made a commitment to solve our problems without guns and violence? You can find statistics to support more laws to keep guns off the streets. You can find statistics to support adding more guns to deter bad things from happening. In either case, people are afraid of guns.

By using weapons to make garden tools and other hand tools, we are creating a symbol for change and we’re asking you to participate. We are asking our communities to dare to use our imaginations to change our impulse. Beating swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, and guns into garden tools creates a dynamic shift in our investment in time and resources. If we are no longer training for war, what else would we be doing? It doesn’t mean we are all to become gardeners, but it does mean we can invest in providing life sustaining resources for our communities.

RAWtools: www.rawtools.org
Marty Troyer: http://blog.chron.com/thepeacepastor/
Texas Gun Sense: www.txgunsense.org