Local nonprofit turns unwanted guns into garden tools
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Volunteers of Guns to Gardens at work. Photo: Courtesy of Guns to Gardens
Kansas City nonprofit Guns to Gardens is destroying unwanted firearms, cutting them up and handing the pieces to blacksmiths who turn them into garden tools.
Why it matters: There's no easy way to permanently get rid of an unwanted gun in the U.S. Owners can sell, trade or surrender them, but a CBS investigation found that in most cases they end up back in circulation.
- Guns to Gardens is one route where they'll end up as scrap metal.
How it works: Drivers pull into the church or community site hosting the event with an unloaded firearm in the trunk or back seat and stay in their vehicle the entire time.
- Firearm safety officers, certified through programs including the U.S. Concealed Carry Association's Range Safety Officer course and NRA firearm safety courses, approach the car and call out a three-step chamber check before removing the gun.
- Volunteers dismantle it on-site. Per Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) guidelines, the receiver is severed in three places, making the firearm permanently inoperable.
Local blacksmiths then repurpose the scrap into garden tools, jewelry and art that are sold, gifted or donated, organizers tell Axios.
- Participants leave with a grocery store gift card: no ID, no paperwork, no questions. Because the gun is destroyed rather than transferred, there's no new owner to register it to.
Flashback: Mennonite pastor Mike Martin started Guns to Gardens after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, founding the Colorado nonprofit RAWtools and taking the name from Isaiah 2:4, the biblical line about beating swords into plowshares.
- The movement reached KC after the 2024 Chiefs parade shooting, where one person was killed and 22 others were wounded. Motivated to make a change, Central Presbyterian Church hosted the metro's first event later that year.
- Guns to Gardens became its own nonprofit this year to expand beyond a single church, and it has destroyed about 150 firearms in the metro since 2024.
Zoom in: The guns turned in are rarely the owner's, says the Rev. Phil Woodson, pastor of Stilwell United Methodist Church and a Guns to Gardens board member.
- They're inherited, left behind after a death or pulled from a shed nobody's opened in years, Woodson tells Axios. The owners are usually widows, worried parents or families clearing out an estate.
What they're saying: Dianna Heffernon, a retired schoolteacher who volunteers for Guns to Gardens, says she's prayed for her students through every school shooting from Columbine on. She wanted to do more than that.
- "I am all about prayer. I believe in the power of prayer. Events like this allow us to put a little action behind our prayer," she tells Axios.
What's next: Guns to Gardens KC hosts its first Johnson County event Saturday at Stilwell United Methodist Church, from 1pm to 3pm.