Jack Walker Published

Shepherdstown Church Converts Dismantled Guns Into Garden Tools

A man breaks through a gun with a power tool. Other stand behind his work station, located in a parking lot.
Outside the Shepherdstown Fire Department, Craig Snyder runs a firearm through a power tool, dismantling it.
Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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The hum of power tools poured out from behind the Shepherdstown Fire Department earlier this month. Drivers approaching the fire hall met with a table of volunteers, and were guided out back to drop off something they no longer wanted: their firearms.

Members of the Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church hosted an event called “Guns to Gardens” on Oct. 12. This was the second annual event in Shepherdstown, though Guns to Gardens programs are held nationwide.

It began with one minister after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, then spread. The idea for the event is pulled from a biblical passage in the Book of Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.”

Participants at the event do just that. They bring unwanted and unloaded firearms, and give them to a team of volunteers on site. Using power tools, the volunteers then dismantle the guns.

Once broken down, they are no longer guns, so no transfer of ownership is required. Congregation members repurpose the leftover wood and scrap metal into gardening tools.

Dave Smith, a volunteer who helped run the power tools, said the team is specially trained to do so. “We follow both the national protocols, and then the kind of techniques that we learned from local metal workers,” he said.

Leslie Williams, a member of Shepherdstown Presbyterian, heard about the event and brought it to the Eastern Panhandle in 2023. Overwhelmed by the scale of gun deaths in the United States, she hoped to make a difference within her own community.

“I’m not anti-gun. This project is not anti-gun. But the senseless deaths — I just couldn’t settle. So when I saw this opportunity come along, I was like, ‘I can do this thing,’” she said. “The first thing that I did was go to my church leadership and say, ‘What do you think?’ And they were just wholeheartedly behind it.”

Firearm deaths in the United States hit a 40-year high in 2021, and members of Shepherdstown Presbyterian say a first step toward a solution is providing an opportunity for residents to safely get rid of unwanted guns.

Sam Jannotta cuts through a gun at the Shepherdstown Guns to Gardens event.

Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Part of a newly broken-down gun lays on the ground beside Jannotta’s work station.

Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Williams said the reasons why residents give up their guns vary.

“It’s everything from people who are old and say, ‘My hunting days are behind me. I’m done with them,’” she said. “We’ve had widows whose husbands were hunters or marksmen, and the husbands died, and they’re like, ‘I don’t know what to do with these guns, and I’d like them gone.’”

Last year, another participant said they wanted to get rid of their guns, but were wary of them ending up in a pawn shop.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen from there,” Williams said.

Participants are given grocery store gift cards in exchange for giving up their guns. Over the course of this year’s event, Williams said the church collected and dismantled a total of 40 guns — 15 more than the year prior.

But gun rights are a touchy subject in West Virginia, and not all residents view the solution to gun violence in the same way.

Williams said the community’s response to the event has been mostly positive. But some residents stopped by to express discontent or raise questions about the event.

Among them was Chris Anders, who is currently running to represent the 97th District in the West Virginia House of Delegates, which encompasses Berkeley County. Anders said he heard about the event and went to see it in person.

“I was actually reloading ammunition for deer season when I got the phone call,” he said. “So I ran down right away to try to judge and ascertain what was actually going on.”

Anders said he was “taken aback” by the event. He does not consider getting rid of guns as a solution to gun violence.

The event is “helping the anti-gun radicals start to vilify and reduce civilian access to firearms,” he said. “If you want to increase liberty, more civilians should have firearms, and also less government agents should.”

Two people prepare a power tool in a parking lot work station.
From left, Paul Woods and Sarah Wagner helped deconstruct guns at this year’s Guns to Gardens event in Shepherdstown.

Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Anders said gun access is protected by the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. But members of the church say they respect the Second Amendment, and are not necessarily taking a partisan stance on gun ownership.

For Smith, Guns to Gardens is also about free choice, because it provides people a safe way to give up their firearms if they so choose. He does not think that will be enough to end gun violence, but that it could still make an impact.

“We’re not going to make a dent in the number of guns in our country, obviously. But for us, it helps,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to change the way we talk about guns and think about guns, and hopefully there are occasions when we may be taking a gun out of an unsafe situation.”

Smith added that beyond interpersonal gun violence, gun deaths can also be caused by suicide or firearm accidents. He said disposing of a gun can potentially reduce these risks.

Anders also expressed concern that historic or valuable guns could be destroyed.

Williams and Smith said they had a gun checker on site during the event, who could tell attendees whether their firearms held financial or historical significance. This allowed them to make more informed decisions, they said.

Anders said he asked to meet the gun checker himself, but was not allowed to do so. Williams said the event was private to protect the anonymity of participants.

Reverend Gusti Linnea Newquist leads the Shepherdstown Presbyterian congregation, and also helped coordinate the Guns to Gardens event. Beyond dismantling firearms, she said the event also offers relief to people who feel burdened by gun ownership.

“We’ve had people come with tears in their eyes, that they finally have a place to give a gun that maybe has been used in a suicide,” she said. “Or just a collection of guns that was from a family member, but they don’t really know what to do with it.”

Newquist said that fits into the mission of her church.

“I would say that we are a congregation that is committed in our identity to working for justice and wholeness in ourselves and in the world,” she said. “So, yeah, [this is] part of who we are as a congregation.”