From Connecticut-
Four New Haven Correctional Center inmates literally beat “swords into ploughshares” on Thursday as they forged new garden tools from donated and repurposed handguns, shotguns, and assault rifles.
Outside of the New Haven police headquarters at 1 Union Ave., the four current New Haven inmates worked with blacksmiths from the Colorado Springs-based RAWtools, Inc. to forge two-sided mattocks out of former handguns, shotguns, and assault rifles acquired by the city’s police department through its annual gun buyback program.
The mattocks, which are foot-long garden tools with a hoe on one side and a two-pronged fork on the other, will ultimately be donated to gardening programs at local high schools like Common Ground, Hillhouse High, and Wilbur Cross High, as well as to the New Haven Land Trust, which runs over 50 community gardens throughout the city.
“Today we raise up the symbol that we don’t have to be tied to instruments of death,” said Jim Curry, a New Haven resident and the recently retired former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut. “We can be tied instruments of life and growing and partnership.”
He quoted the passage from the Book of Isaiah that provided the spiritual inspiration for the enterprise: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
More here-
https://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/local_sculptor_clergy_turn_guns_into_plowshares/
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