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Amy Bishell never had much interest in guns. Her dad grew up hunting and had an old M1903 Springfield that he used for deer hunting. It’s a military rifle, a model used in both world wars.
On the night of June 10, Bishell examined the gun and took photos of it. She was surprised by how heavy it felt in her arms. “There was an imprint on the bottom of a deer,” she says. “It was kind of pretty.”
Also in the gun case was a hunting license from 1993 — the last time, she suspects, that her dad ever went hunting. He’s in his late 70s now, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and the family worries about what might happen if he were to go looking for his old rifle.
“With Alzheimer’s, he has some vivid dreams and wakes up. We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Bishell explains. “And he’s not going to go hunting any more. And no one in the family is comfortable with guns or interested in hunting. My mother and brother and I would feel better with it not in the house.”
So Bishell brought the rifle to the Midvale Community Lutheran Church at the corner of Midvale and Tokay for the Guns to Garden Tools Safe-Surrender Event on June 11. Bishell is the first to surrender a gun for the event, which she is also a volunteer for.
The guns turned in at the event will find a new life — reformed into garden tools. People surrendering weapons drive into one end of the parking lot, chat with volunteers, and fill out some forms. Volunteers remove the guns from the rear of the vehicles. After checking to make sure the guns are not loaded, they cut them into several pieces with a chop saw. Sparks fly off of the saw blade and the smell of burning metal drifts through the parking lot.
The day started with a blessing from The Rev. Scott Marrese-Wheeler, pastor of the Oakland-Cambridge Presbyterian Church. He opens with a reading from Ecclesiastes, the famous “A Time for Everything” prayer with the lines: “A time to kill, and a time to heal,” and “a time to love, and a time to hate.”
The lines are slightly jarring in the context, and Marrese-Wheeler later says the reading is somewhat of a trial run and might be adjusted at future gun surrenders.
Marrese-Wheeler is active in the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort and has been concerned about gun violence for decades. One of the most common ways gun violence affects his parishioners is through suicide.
“Guns are often used in suicides. A higher percentage of men will use a firearm in suicide,” he says. “So many older men, rural areas, farmers, that’s what they do.”
Nobody surrendering guns today shares any stories of tragedies about their guns. Sherry Holly turned over a 16-gauge, bolt-action shotgun. “I don’t even know where it came from. I found it on some property that I bought,” she says. “It could have been my dad’s, I don’t know. I have no use for it and it could get in the wrong hands.”
Holly spent years in the Wisconsin Air National Guard and has handled and used weapons. She owns a remote place in the country and has contemplated whether a gun might be useful for self-defense. But ultimately, she decided there are simply too many guns in this country. Her father also had an antique rifle stolen from his attic, so she doesn’t want this shotgun to meet the same fate.
“You never know who might be in your house, looking around,” she says. “This way I know it’s one less gun on the street.”
The organizer of the event, Jeff Wild, is a retired pastor who has taken up blacksmithing as a hobby. He will take the guns collected here today to turn into garden tools, like pruning hooks, weeders and trowels.
“Everybody calls it melting them down, but we’re transforming them,” he says, holding up one of his tools. “This was a shotgun. You split it open. I cut it up the middle with a cutting tool. Then I grind it down and shine it up.”
He doesn’t use every bit of the gun, but for now he’s holding onto all the excess pieces. He’s connected with a woodworker who is trying to figure out ways to reform gun stocks and saving other parts that might be used by sculptors or jewelers.
Wild acknowledges that the people who are turning in guns here today are not at risk of becoming mass murderers. But the event could still save lives. As a pastor, he also saw a number of people lost to suicide.
“I don’t have any illusions that Madison will be a safer community tomorrow, but I’m confident that the people who surrender these firearms, their homes will be safer than they were yesterday,” he says. “There are more shootings that occur in homes accidentally, or in abusive situations or suicides.
“In that respect, anybody who surrenders is safer, but I doubt that our streets will be.”
Gun deaths in Wisconsin, 2019: 604
Number of those deaths who were children: 49
Percentage of Wisconsin gun deaths that were suicides: 71
Number of guns in the United States for every 100 people: 120.5
Guns surrendered at the event: 29 firearms, including two AR-15s
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