BRATTLEBORO — On April 20, a 12-year-old girl was shot and killed in Hartford, Connecticut, while sitting in a parked car.
“The same thing happened - also in Hartford - 29 years ago. That should have been a turning point. It wasn't. We need to just keep working at it with faith, prayer, and action and know we're not alone.”
So said Right Rev. James Curry, retired Episcopal bishop suffragan of Connecticut, in a recent conversation about his upcoming visit to Brattleboro.
Curry is co-founder of Swords to Plowshares Northeast (S2P), which will share its wherefore, knowhow, and why on Saturday, April 29, in a gun safety and violence prevention event at Retreat Farm.
The organization's vision is “to be the go-to civilian source for managing gun buybacks and repurposing the weapons.”
It takes its name from a verse in the Book of Isaiah: “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.”
Curry, a founding member of Bishops United against Gun Violence, serves as S2P's head of operations and chief blacksmith, creating the gardening tools, jewelry, and works of art that ultimately emerge from the group.
Charged with organizing forge demonstrations with community and religious groups throughout the Northeast, he notes that S2P has presented all around Connecticut and the organization has worked with groups in Pennsylvania, Maine, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C.
The visit to Retreat Farm marks S2P's first event in Vermont.
According to S2P's website, its mission is “to build coalitions of community groups, religious organizations, police departments, hospitals, and businesses. All working together, we will build sustainable efforts across the country to help reduce gun violence.”
With that context, the event is sponsored by St. Michael's Episcopal Church, in collaboration with the Windham County Sheriff's Department, the Brattleboro Police Department, and the Windham County NAACP, and 13 area faith communities: All Souls Church, Unitarian Universalist; Brattleboro Area Jewish Community; Brattleboro Zen Center; Centre Congregational Church, UCC; Dummerston Congregational Church, UCC; First Congregational Church of Brattleboro, UCC; First United Methodist Church; Guilford Community Church, UCC; Newfane Congregational Church, UCC; Trinity Lutheran Church; Putney Friends Meeting; Vermont Insight Meditation; and Vermont Interfaith Initiative.
S2P will bring together a number of community leaders, including Steffen Gillom, president, Windham County NAACP; Marc Thurman, the NAACP's education committee chair; Brattleboro Police Chief Norma Hardy; Windham County Sheriff Mark Anderson; the Right Rev. Thomas Ely, retired bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont; and Cliff L. Wood, a St. Michael's parishioner, and the event's co-chair.
The event, which will offer a performance by Shoulder Narrows, an student-run, low-voice, a cappella group, will also honor two regional organizations dedicated to connecting community with farming and food: Edible Brattleboro and SUSU Community Farm.
Wood will offer a look at the garden tools created from weapons and present them to the two organizations.
Established in 2017 by Curry and three other anti-gun-violence advocates, S2P is a small not-for-profit funded primarily by individual donations. As described on its website, the organization focuses “on reducing gun violence in the communities in which our events take place.
“With 40,000 gun deaths per year in our country, something must be done now,” the organization asserts. “The strategy we apply to this problem is to convert weapons of death into tools of life, and then use those tools to the betterment of the community. All with the goal of reducing senseless gun deaths.”
At the Brattleboro gathering, following remarks by various area leaders committed to curbing gun violence, Curry will speak and then launch a live demonstration, where he will take weapons and forge them into tools and implements of nurture.
Attendees can hammer a ringed rifle part into a heart, or they can volunteer to try a hand at the forging and heavy hammering required to make the garden tools.
“We are very aware of the need for safety,” he adds, so safety protocols will be followed.
Birth of a movement
The genesis of S2P is symbolized by a welded cross Curry wears when in bishop attire. “It comes from Mozambique,” Curry explains. “I received it when I was visiting an Anglican church there in 2006.”
At the time, Bishop Dinis Sengulane of Mozambique's Anglican Diocese of Lebombo was spearheading an effort to get guns out of the countryside where they'd been hidden during the civil war that ravaged the African country from 1977 to 1992.
After the war, Curry says, the bishop insisted the country had to rid itself of guns that remained in garden plots and other clandestine sites.
“They worked with Christian Aid, out of Great Britain, inviting citizens to turn in guns in an effort to rebuild,” Curry says.
A program to buy back the guns took place throughout the impoverished country. With that initiative proven to be remarkably successful, Sengulane pushed the envelope and challenged not only blacksmiths but also artists to make symbols of hope and peace out of the decommissioned gun parts.
Curry's cross is made from two such pieces welded together-with both from a disassembled AK-47.
He has maintained a strong relationship with Sengulane, who he describes as “a very creative thinking and do-er working to control malaria, AIDS, [tuberculosis], poverty, and gun violence.” Curry calls the success in Mozambique “a major incentive for launching S2P.”
S2P's founding was also sparked at the annual gathering of the National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Newtown Action Alliance in 2016, where Curry met Rev. Jeremy Lucas, pastor of Lake Oswego (Oregon) Christ Church.
Lucas had heard of a local girls sports team that wanted to raise funds to attend a tournament in California. So they had a raffle.
The prize: an AR-15 rifle.
Lucas purchased $3,000 worth of tickets, hoping to win the rifle - to keep it out of circulation and to destroy it. It worked - he won.
From there, the priest reached out to RawTools, a Mennonite-initiated, Colorado-based program to gain knowhow - and tools - needed to take a destructive prize and turn it into into something constructive.
“A few of us there wanted to launch a program similar to Raw Tools' in the Northeast, starting in Connecticut,” Curry recalls.
Guns to gardens
Bishop Curry has worked for 30 years in gun violence prevention and with families traumatized by shooting deaths. When he retired from the bishopry in 2012, he began devoting his full attention to gun-violence prevention, working in Hartford with victims and community groups.
“I did a lot of legwork federally as well as in Connecticut, but I found that the hands-on teaching around basic skills focused on transformation became a life for me,” Curry recalls.
So when the S2P founders began to get their project off the ground, they began working with Episcopal and UCC leaders in Connecticut: talking, planning, and making connections with local police departments. In New Haven, “where gun buybacks were already happening, both police and others said, 'Yes, let's try it - we'll not just buy guns back; we'll transform them.'”
With no blacksmithing skills, Curry connected with RawTools' Mike Martin and spent a week with him and his father, Fred, to learn what he needed to do to transform the weapons.
The Martins “became friends, as well as teachers,” Curry says.
A community garden movement was steadily growing in New Haven, “so we contacted folks there to tie into that. The police department and mayor's office offered lots of support and soon S2P was underway, starting in Connecticut's third largest city,” Curry says.
They started “with a few blacksmithing pieces.” And soon they were given funds to buy a trailer, which has let S2P take its show on the road to work with and help empower school groups, churches, and community groups.
An act of empowerment
With S2P, says Curry, “I have found focus on God's promise of peace that is not yet fully realized by any means. S2P allows us to participate in action toward fulfillment of that promise.”
This new movement - guns to garden tools - is emerging in various ways across the country. Groups from New England to Oakland, California are organizing a blacksmithing marathon for the month of June, livestreaming blacksmiths at work around the clock for 31 days to recognize those killed last year in the U.S. by guns.
“It's important to note that two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides,” Curry adds, noting S2P's focus on making sure that “lost, forgotten, and unsecured guns [are] discovered and secured to keep them away from curious kids and teens, to prevent accidental shootings.”
“We just want people to think carefully about keeping guns in homes,” he continues. “If they want to get rid of them, there are avenues for doing so; if they choose to keep them, we just want them to be safe.
Curry asserts that too many people have loaded guns unsecured in their homes, calling it “an invitation for disaster.”
“We are not about taking guns away from people,” he says. “It's about safe usage and safe storage of weapons.”
Available at the event will be free gun safety locks and information about gun safety, mental health, suicide prevention, and how-to dispose of firearms safely and securely.
The impact of S2P is clear. In a recent news broadcast from Providence, Rhode Island, television station WLNE, covering a S2P event at nearby UMass Dartmouth, one student said that instead of just talking about the onslaught of news of gun violence, students there “are taking a different approach.”
They are learning that dismay can be channeled into positive action.
Prior to the pandemic, S2P worked in prisons, offering prisoners an opportunity to forge tools of nurture from tools of violence.
“These are guys who know gun violence” Curry remarks, “and they were proud to be making the tools.”
S2P was invited to participate in last year's Wear Orange (wearorange.org) in Washington, D.C., where interfaith leaders from that region and beyond staged a day of demonstration. After a press conference at the Capitol, they marched to Washington City Church of the Brethren, where the S2P forge was set up.
Part of the service allowed individuals to take turns hammering: each time the anvil hit metal, a name was spoken from a list of all victims of shootings in the District of Columbia from the first five months of 2022, along with all victims of mass shootings elsewhere in the country in that time period.
S2P forges are mobile and scattered around Connecticut. “I think we're a model for the country,” Curry surmises.
He and all at S2P are happy to consult with others who want to launch similar initiatives. “Connecticut politicians are 100% behind us,” Curry says. “We have strong government support, yet it's still so frustrating to look at the lack of progress around the country.”
In response, S2P offers an outlet.
“We invite legislators back to the forge to pound out their frustration and anger,” Curry says.
He notes how Chris Murphy, who represents his state in the U.S. Senate, keeps at it doggedly in Washington “butting heads and seeing so little gain, but staying with it. The rest of us have to add other dimensions so we can go beyond the gridlock.”
Despite the politicization of guns, as a nonprofit, S2P is nonpartisan, and Curry tries to keep politics at arm's length. “Really,” he says.
“We just want to be the Johnny Appleseed of gun violence prevention,” Curry says. “We're just one teeny component of a solution.”
That component comes at a time of escalating violence.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit and nonpartisan group that collects and aggregates data on gun violence in the U.S., 44,348 people died from guns in 2022. Of those people, 20,090 died from suicide, and 20,258 were killed in homocides or accidental shootings.
As of April 23, 13,031 people have died from gun violence since the first of the year. Put another way, with 69% of the year remaining, more than 42,000 people will die by the new year if the current trends prevail.
Curry contemplates this dizzying increase in gun violence seen over the last few weeks in the form of more mass shootings to wrong-place-wrong-time incidents.
“As a Christian,” he says, “I have to live in hope. I see people really connect with the idea that instruments of potential harm can be transformed into instruments of nurture.”
With so-called “stand-your-ground” laws giving people license to be aggressive with firearms, Curry sees a “love affair with guns.”
“I think this is wrong,” he says. “I don't think that's what the Second Amendment allows.”
He called the recent spate of highly publicized injuries and deaths of young people “obscene.”
“We have to see a turnaround in our culture that says it's not OK to shoot another - especially for something as painfully innocent as turning around in someone else's driveway,” he said. “The way to change is to start small and keep cultivating solutions.”