Forging hope: The Oakland blacksmith who's making guns into garden tools

In a dark, cavernous room near the Port of Oakland's massive cranes and shipping terminals, John Colle Rogers was bent over, sorting through a big box of old guns and gun parts, illuminated by a single ray of sunlight streaming in through the window high above him.

"It's a paratrooper stock for SKS," he mused, examining a well-worn piece that used to belong to a rifle, before putting it back in the box.

Rogers is no stranger to firearms. Long before he began dismantling them and turning them into art, they were simply a part of his daily life.

"I grew up in North Dakota," he explained. "It was not unusual, in the fall, for you to walk into somebody's garage and there's a deer hanging there."

But when he moved to Oakland, Rogers said he learned that people living here have a very different relationship with guns than he did growing up.

"Here, they're a tool of fear," he said. "They're a tool that people use to either threaten other people, or to defend themselves."

The most dangerous place in the state

Rogers wasn't imagining things. Counting violent crimes per capita, the latest data from the California Department of Justice shows that Oakland is the most dangerous city in the whole state. Though the reasons for Oakland's historic rise in crime are complex and the subject of frequent debate, Paula Hawthorn thinks she knows one contributing factor:

"Oakland has one of the highest homicide rates among all the cities in the state of California," she said. "It has that high homicide rate because of all the guns."

Wearing a T-shirt from the Brady Campaign against gun violence, Hawthorn spoke with us on a rainy November afternoon in the parking lot of West Oakland's Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church. Behind her, Oakland police officers were tagging and examining a growing pile of guns — everything from revolvers to hunting rifles with scopes. Before Hawthorn came along, the city hadn't seen a gun buyback event in 10 years. So what she's trying is an old idea with a new twist.

"People with all these guns, bad things happen," she said. "We have to get the guns off the streets."

A new twist on an old idea

A traditional gun buyback offers payment in cash or gift cards to anyone who surrenders a gun — no questions asked. And in that way, this event follows the usual format. Gun buybacks have met with a steady stream of skepticism over the years, from those who doubt they actually keep guns out of the hands of criminals. One of those skeptics was a young man who came to surrender an old gun he got from his grandfather.

"You know, you can go a state over and buy a gun with no ID or anything," he said, holding the $50 Target gift card he'd just been given.

But his mood changed when a volunteer handed him something else: a small garden spade made from the barrel of a shotgun, with some of the gun's details and markings still intact. For the first time during our conversation, he began to smile.

"This is pretty cool — a little spade?" he mused, turning it over and over in his hands. "Give this to my grandma — Christmas gift?"

The spade was the handiwork of John Colle Rogers, who showed us a table full of similarly-sized digging tools — each a little different, and each made from the parts of a single gun that was surrendered right here in Oakland.

"People love these tools," Hawthorn said. "We should be selling them, people say."

But the garden tools are something money can't buy: You have to give up your own gun to get one.

From tools of death to tools of life

Back at his workshop, Rogers showed us the process. The goal is to make one garden tool for each gun surrendered, but because not every gun has a long enough barrel to form a tool handle, he'll often make two of them out of a single shotgun barrel. That means slicing it in half is the first step.

"I'll make a slice like this, I'll make another slice like that," he said, marking the barrel with chalk. "I'll leave in markings or little mechanical parts. ... I want to sort of make things a little bit more gritty, and a reminder ... of what this little digging tool came from."

Rogers walked the gun over to his electric chop saw, and golden sparks flew everywhere as he sliced the heavy steel barrel in half.

If you ask Paula Hawthorn, Rogers is doing the Lord's work — in the most literal sense of the words.

"The main difference between us and any other gun buyback is we are faith-based," she explained.

Hawthorn's organization is called Guns to Gardens. It's the Oakland chapter of a nonprofit started by a Mennonite blacksmith in Colorado, as a direct response to the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. It was inspired by a common English translation of one of the most well-known Bible verses, Isaiah 2:4.

"And they shall forge their swords into plowshares," volunteer Cara Meredith read the verse aloud as she stood next to Hawthorn.

"And we decided that this needed to happen in Oakland," Hawthorn said.

Guns to Gardens has held four buyback events so far, partnering with a local church for each of them. On this day, they were at a church whose pastor also serves on Oakland's public safety commission.

"What I love about this interpretation (of Isaiah 2:4) is it's practical," said Pastor Michael Wallace. "In the sense that you can really take a weapon of destruction, and transform it into a tool that generates life."

An art dating back to Biblical times

As with all Bible verses, there are many translations of Isaiah 2:4, but all share the general theme of beating or hammering the implements of war into rakes, shovels and other tools for turning soil. For Guns to Gardens, the choice of a translation that includes the word "forge" was a deliberate nod to the art of the blacksmith.

"Forging, which is heating metal up into a plastic state — not necessarily melting it, but heating it up into a plastic state — and shaping it like clay, where you can sort of smush it and spread it, twist it, bend it," Rogers said.

For modern steel, that plastic state is achieved at about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit — a temperature that turns the metal a glowing red, then yellow, then quite literally white hot. As they rest against the small rectangular opening of Rogers' propane-fired forge, fire shoots out of the gun barrels for the last time.

"There's a lot of intense thoughts that arise when you're working with firearms," Rogers pondered. "Destroying what is sometimes a very fine piece of machinery with the potential to take a life ... to let that piece of metal carry on with a new story."

And that story begins with a few sharp clinks of Rogers' hammer. Once the metal is out of the forge, he has only seconds to begin shaping it. Its color changes as it begins to cool off almost instantly. The hustle he needs to put those forceful blows in just the right spot before the metal cools and hardens, he said, is the origin of the phrase, "Strike while the iron is hot."

"It's a lot of utilization of power in a very short time, so you have to be really focused," he said. "You have to be really 'on.'"

First with a large hammer, then with a smaller one, he begins to split open and flatten out part of the cylindrical gun barrel, forming what will ultimately become the blade of a small shovel. As he works, he moves it around to different spots on a huge anvil that's over a hundred years old.

"When you see an anvil, you're looking at a bunch of different shapes that have evolved over centuries and centuries," he said. "As you can see, I'm using the whole vocabulary of the anvil: the face, the horn, all the different parts."

Each part of the anvil has a purpose, and when used together, they can help a blacksmith make almost any shape out of a hot piece of metal. Anvils have been around since ancient times, and they're even mentioned in the Book of Isaiah.

Once the metal has cooled, it goes back into the fire while Rogers works on the next piece. In an almost meditative state, focused on precisely landing each blow of the hammer as the metal changes color and the forge rumbles in the background, he gradually transforms the lethal end of a firearm into something entirely different, all in a matter of minutes. He adds the finishing touches with a grinder, sending sparks flying through the air once again, as he gives the shovel blade its classic, pointed spade shape.

"It's probably still 3-400 degrees, so we'll just set that aside," he said, still holding the nearly-finished tool with long metal tongs.

Turning it over, he noticed the insignia still clearly engraved on the back.

"There you go — Remington Arms Company," he pointed out.

Murky origin stories

By their very nature, gun buybacks are anonymous. So we may never know the full story of how some of these guns made their way to Rogers' forge. In some cases, it's simple, said Pastor Wallace.

"We have a lot of our seniors who have shotguns and hunting rifles in their homes, and they'd like to get rid of them— they just didn't know how," he said.

But in other cases, it's not so clear. Though police catalog each surrendered gun in case it's evidence in a crime, the rest of the details are sometimes a mystery. At this particular event, police collected a sawed-off shotgun with well-worn grip tape wrapped around the stock.

"We see a lot of shotguns like this at illegal gambling shacks," an officer explained to volunteers.

There was also a semi-automatic pistol surrendered with a 33-round extended magazine. Police say it's a kind of gun they often see used in robberies.

"More than likely, this firearm came from another state," the officer told volunteers.

Numbers that matter

In all, Guns to Gardens has collected more than 300 firearms so far in Oakland, over the course of four buyback events.

"And so we look at that," said Cara Meredith, "and we say, 'This matters.'"

But what matters to Rogers is a much smaller number.

"If we did all that and we saved one life, we're doing well," he said.

Now, as Rogers forges hundreds of guns into garden tools, Pastor Wallace would suggest he's also forging something else.

"They symbolize hope," he said of the tools. "They really symbolize hope."