In April, in commemoration of Earth Month, the Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah, or GVPC Utah, hosted a “Guns to Gardens” forging demonstration at an on-campus garden at the University of Utah.
The event, with blacksmiths doing the honors, showed how guns can be recycled into garden tools — turning the stock and barrel of a rifle, for example, into the handle and head of a perfectly functional shovel.
But beyond demonstrating another way to help conserve the Earth, GVPC Utah’s much larger motive is to help conserve us humans.
Year in, year out, too many of us die by gunshots. Worse, too many of us die because the person who pulled the trigger is the person who owns the gun.
“Our biggest problem in Utah, by far, is suicide.”
That’s Nancy Halden talking. Nancy is the communications director for GVPC Utah. The statistics she delivers are sobering:
- Utah has the seventh highest gun suicide average in the country, at a rate of 11.5 deaths per 100,000 people (the national average is 7.5).
- Out of the 454 people who die in Utah every year, on average, by gunshots, 79 are homicides, while the remaining 375 — that’s 83% — are suicides.
The cold hard truth is that far more people die with their own hand on the trigger than at the hand of somebody else.
In the hopes of preserving lives, GVPC Utah’s role, with Guns to Gardens and various other programs, is to draw attention to that fact.
“In that moment of despair, when someone is at a loss and can see no hope, if you can separate them from their gun, even for 15 minutes, that moment will pass and they will live,” says Nancy.
The purpose of GVPC Utah, she makes clear, is not to get rid of guns altogether; it’s to get rid of gun violence. That translates to more responsible gun ownership, better laws dealing with gun maintenance and storage, and, especially, more awareness that gun violence is a problem.
“We’re less about numbers than we are about getting the word out,” says Nancy, who is not gun unfriendly and grew up shooting a rifle on hunting trips in her native Georgia. “Gun ownership is going to happen in the United States and that’s fine. Utah’s a very gun friendly place; Utahns love their guns. But we need better regulations and safeguards in place to limit the violence. And it’s not just the loss of life; more people are wounded every year than killed, and then there’s the emotional fallout.”
Lawmakers, she contends, are slow to tighten gun laws. “Most gun owners are very safety focused and responsible; they would like to see better laws that are saving lives. It’s the gun owners that die,” she says, “but it’s our politicians, driven by money from the gun lobby, that are slow to act. Utah is a very frustrating place to try and move gun violence issues”
She decries a safe storage bill presented in the Legislature this year that didn’t even make it out of committee.
“Safe storage is one of the best suicide prevention measures,” she says. “States that have storage laws find they have lower gun violence rates, while rates in Utah remain above the national average.”
The safest storage, of course, is dismantling unneeded, unwanted or unattended guns entirely.
That’s where Guns to Gardens, a nationwide drive overseen by an organization called Raw Tools, comes in.
Each year, GVPC of Utah holds a special event collecting unwanted guns that will be dismantled and disassembled, then forged by blacksmiths into trowels, shovels, hoes and so forth.
This year’s event is scheduled for Saturday, June 13, at the Episcopal Diocese in downtown Salt Lake City at 75 S. 200 East. Details are at gvpc.org.
Many of the guns come from people “who have been affected by gun violence,” says Nancy, “and they come to help with the forging. It can be a very cathartic experience. We get lots of calls from families who have had a suicide and want to get ride of their guns. We’ve had people turn in guns who said they were concerned about the mental health of a family member.”
Last year, one family that had experienced a suicide death turned in 11 guns.
“That’s the thing that keeps us doing what we do,” says Nancy. “Nobody wants gun violence. That’s why we keep turning guns into plowshares.”
