Memphis church hopes to reduce violence by turning guns into garden tools at gun surrender event
A Memphis church is hoping to reduce the number of guns on the city's streets by dismantling ones turned over and turning them into gardening tools.
Evergreen Presbyterian Church, Feb. 24, will host a drive through gun surrender event where gun owners can turn in unloaded firearms in exchange for Kroger gift cards.
"Like so many in our community, our church is concerned about the extreme level of gun violence in Memphis and the lives that are being devastated every day," Rev. Patrick Harley, pastor of Evergreen Presbyterian Church, said in a press release. "We are offering this event as an affirmation of our commitment to peacemaking by working to reduce gun violence in Memphis and Shelby County."
The event is part of a national "Guns to Gardens" movement that Evergreen Presbyterian Church said has resulted in thousands of guns being dismantled.
"People who, for whatever reason, have guns that they no longer want will be able to safely and anonymously surrender those firearms to be dismantled and later transformed into garden tools," Harley said. "This is foundational to our faith — taking weapons designed to destroy and transforming them into tools that bring life."
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The event will be hosted at Presbytery of the Midsouth, located at 449 Patterson St. near the University of Memphis, and the church will be taking guns from 12 p.m. until 4 p.m.
Anyone looking to surrender a firearm must bring them unloaded and stored securely in their trunk. People working the event will take them from the car and take them to a chop saw station to be dismantled.
No background checks will be done and nobody will collect personal information since this event is not a "buy back" event, the press release said, and gun ownership is not transferred.
Trained volunteers will dismantle the guns at the chop saw station. Once the firearm is dismantled, it is no longer legally a gun.
The dismantled firearms will be repurposed for the Metal Petals & Healing Roots event, hosted by the Metal Museum on March 23. There, artists from the museum, the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Memphis, and Moore Tech will create art from the dissembled gun parts collected at the Evergreen "Guns to Gardens" event.
An exhibition of the art created at the Metal Museum will be on display at Evergreen from April 6 until April 20th.
The Kroger gift cards will be given out until they are gone, and $50 will be given for handguns, $100 for rifles and shotguns and $150 for semi-automatic and automatic guns. Homemade and kit guns will be accepted and destroyed, but not eligible for gift cards, the press release said.
The press release cites the record-high number of homicides in 2023, along with statistics from the Memphis Police Department, that indicated the vast majority of reported crimes involved guns last year.
"Gun owners may want to surrender guns for a range of reasons," the press release said. "The gun owner may have children or grandchildren in the home. A gun owner may have reached an age where they no longer feel that they can safely handle weapons. A gun may have been returned to family by the police after it was used in a suicide or accident. There may be a conflict in a family or there may be a family member with a serious illness. Guns to Gardens provides a way to dispose of unwanted guns without returning them to the gun marketplace, where they could be used for future harm."
Lucas Finton is a criminal justice reporter with The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached at Lucas.Finton@commercialappeal.com, or (901)208-3922, and followed on X, formerly known as Twitter, @LucasFinton.
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis church hosting gun surrender event for Kroger gift cards
