St. David’s Episcopal Church in Southfield, Michigan, hosted a “Guns and Arts” community buyback event in June 2024. The unwanted guns that were collected were cut and transformed into jewelry and pieces of art. Michigan Bishop Bonnie Perry blessed the saws before they destroyed the firearms. Photo: Todd Nissen
[Episcopal News Service] After continuously advocating for firearm violence prevention, Episcopal leaders in the Diocese of Michigan are celebrating the passing of the state’s newest gun safety law, which requires the state police to completely destroy all guns turned in during community buyback events.
“We are committed to making changes that matter,” Michigan Bishop Bonnie Perry told Episcopal News Service. “All of the work we’ve been doing with End Gun Violence Michigan – which is a coalition of 50 faith and secular groups – is how we, who happen to be Episcopalians, are embodying our baptismal promises, how we’re living out gospel values and, frankly, how we are saving lives.”
Perry — a co-convener of Bishops United Against Gun Violence, a network of more than 100 Episcopal bishops working to curtail gun violence — was instrumental in helping to launch End Gun Violence Michigan, a grassroots group credited with helping several gun safety laws pass in the state over the last couple of years.
Gun safety has been a growing issue of concern in Michigan in recent years, especially after the mass shootings at Michigan State University in East Lansing in 2023 and at Oxford High School in Oxford Township in 2021.
“We’ve had two horrible mass shootings in schools, but we also have continuous gun violence in rural areas and in our urban centers,” Perry said. “When people see that a church is taking a stand and offering a service for something they care about, they can be reassured that the church understands their fears and sadness.”
Since 2022, St. David’s Episcopal Church in Southfield, a suburb of Detroit, has hosted several public gun buyback events, where hundreds of unwanted firearms have been collected in exchange for Target or Meijer gift cards. The guns are supposed to be melted down to prevent further use.
Despite the genuine effort to reduce the number of firearms, however, Yaw later learned from a New York Times investigation that the guns police agencies, St. David’s and other churches and organizations in the Lower Peninsula collected weren’t being melted down as promised. Instead, a private company that collected the guns from the buybacks was only destroying the frame or receiver – whichever piece has the serial number – of each firearm and recycling the remaining parts to sell as gun kits online.
“I blew a gasket when I found out,” the Rev. Chris Yaw, rector of St. David’s, told ENS. “We contacted our legislators, and Gov. [Gretchen] Whitmer signed our bill into law so that now in Michigan, when you donate a gun at a buyback or when the municipality gets a gun earmarked for destruction … it will not be broken down and recycled on the internet and making third parties millions of dollars.”
Yaw pointed out that guns have a “very long shelf life,” and St. David’s has collected intact guns dating back to the Civil War at buybacks. “We’ve had families stuck with their loved one’s massive gun collection after they die, and they don’t know what to do with it other than get rid of it.”
Some of the buyback events at St. David’s have included an arts and crafts component, where guns are destroyed on site using specialized saws and transformed into jewelry, rosaries, key fobs and other works of art. During one “Guns and Crafts” event in June 2024, Perry blessed the saws ahead their use throughout the summer.
“I see this kind of ministry as a means of congregational vitality and development, how our communities of faith become hubs for their local neighbors – as a place where people can turn to,” Perry said. “For many people, they feel safer and more comfortable dropping off their unwanted guns at a church than a police station. …We’re offering pastoral care to people as they are getting rid of these unwanted guns.”
Perry and Yaw both said many people who turn in guns at buybacks need pastoral care because the guns have become a source of grief and fear, especially if a loved one was harmed or killed by gunshot.
Yaw said one woman turned in a pistol that she discovered was loaded inside her mattress after her husband died, for example.
“She freaked out because she had no idea her husband owned a gun or that he had it their entire married life, but she felt relieved when she saw that she could safely get rid of it at St. David’s,” Yaw said.
As for grief, “Many families have brought in guns that were responsible for their loved ones dying by suicide,” Yaw said.
Most U.S. gun deaths are suicides, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control classifies as a public health issue particularly in rural areas. Over the last 20 years, suicide rates have been higher in rural areas than urban areas.
On average, 1,421 Michiganders die annually from gun violence, according to data compiled by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of Jan. 29, nationwide 1,807 people have died from gun violence this year, including 21 from mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an American nonprofit that catalogs every gun-related death in the United States. A mass shooting is any shooting in which at least four people are shot.
Episcopalians can learn more about the church’s gun safety legislation dating to 1976 here.
-Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.