The Table at UGA will host Guns to Gardens, an event that turns unwanted firearms into art and garden tools, on March 28. The Rev. Haley Lerner, one of the ministers at The Table, an inclusive Christian campus ministry, explains what the event is and why they chose to introduce it to the Athens community, as conversations about gun safety continue nationwide.
Q: How did the idea for the Guns to Gardens event come about?
A: We go on a retreat every January at Montreat Conference Center, which is a conference center located outside of Asheville in North Carolina, and it’s Presbyterian. In January of 2025, they hosted Raw Tools South. It’s an organization that does the actual work of taking unwanted guns, destroying them and turning them into art and garden tools. A couple of our students went to their workshop and got to operate the welding stuff. We got to participate in building some of that art. We were like, what if we did that here? It started mostly with Will (Norman), our executive director, and me just kind of seeing if there were interested churches. Through that kind of communication, it has come together.
Q: Have you faced any backlash from the community regarding the event?
A: We have a little bit, and we are starting and have begun to really push, not politicize, but push the advertisements and things like that. As we’ve started to do that, we face some pushback from the public. I’ve gotten a couple of messages that are like, “How dare you take away my Second Amendment rights?” People are really, really sensitive for all sorts of reasons. I was actually expecting a little bit more on social media, because whenever we do something that some might consider controversial, there are almost always weird comments on Instagram. We haven’t received that yet.
Q: How do you navigate negative conversations toward this event?
A: If they’re in good faith, that is someone I’m willing to engage with. I’m happy to tell you a bit about us and why we believe this is important. And not to convince you or change your mind, but to say that anonymous messages on email and Instagram are maybe not the most conducive places for hard conversations. Or if they’re not in good faith and they’re just rude, I ignore them. My hope with this kind of event is not to change people’s minds that are already made up, but to either invite conversation, to think about things in a different way or actually practically resolve a problem that somebody might have.
Q: Why do you think this event is specifically important for the UGA and Athens community?
A: I don’t think there has been any church or organization that has hosted an event like this, and so I think it brings and invites this very interesting conversation around guns, and why we have them. If there is somebody in your household who has been diagnosed with a mental illness, having a gun in your home is not a safe thing, and again, we want to address some of the problems that could potentially exist.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add that I might have missed?
A: There’s a passage in Isaiah that the idea is kind of built from. They will beat their swords into plowshares and study war no more. And there’s this call to peaceful living. We don’t use swords anymore, and most of us don’t have plowshares, but what we do have are guns. There’s this idea and this hope that we are sowing seeds of peace, as opposed to treating each other violently. Jesus calls us to live and love one another. I believe, personally, it’s very hard to love your neighbor if you’re willing to shoot them.
Comments trimmed for length and clarity.
Jordyn Mobley is a journalism graduate student in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. This story was produced in the Religion Reporting course.
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