Officially Now a Movement

Somebody emailed me this:

Message: This is so timely. I am part of the XXX peace coalition and we met tonight and were asking ourselves, "how do we as a peace community "respond" to all of this gun violence?". I am not good with words, but the visual you depict is chilling and I am curious, want more information and insight from you on the creation/reaction you have witnessed. 

thank you for leading this with an artistic voice!

Whenever I post an email like this I delete any identifying features in the text.  The XXX refers to a western state.  The email is lovely, but what makes it amazing is that it came out of the blue from so far away.  Amazing is the wrong word, given the power of the internet, but still, given that at this point I've not really gone "public" in a committed way, it is quite something.

Maya Lin's inspirational work, and a reader's comment

Maya Lin burst onto the art scene when she won the competition to create the Vietnam Veterans' War Memorial in Washington DC.  My draft number was 303, so I didn't have to go to Vietnam.  Nonetheless, I find it extraordinary.

But my favorite work of hers is this:

Called "Storm King Earthworks", it is installed in the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York.

A similar photograph of this extraordinary work is seen at the top of each page of the PeaceWorks Project website.

A visitor to the site wrote me with this:

"I love your use of Maya Lin's very moving work.  Art should be about dialogue, and Lin's work (at least as explained through your eyes) seems to be about a dialogue between the living and the dead.  As if to say 'We acknowledge your passing.  And we'll do everything in our power to keep others from suffering the same fate.'
"If your PeaceWorks can foster a dialogue like that, they will have served a very important purpose.  Best of luck."

The most wanted gun in America

This is the headline from an article in the New York Times today by Natasha Singer.  It starts like this:

THE phone rings again at Pasadena Pawn and Gun, and a familiar question comes down the line: “Got any ARs?”

The answer is no. Pasadena Pawn and Gun, a gun retailer and pawnshop 15 miles south of Baltimore, is pretty much sold out of America’s most wanted gun, the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle. Since the massacre in Newtown, Conn., in December, the AR-15, the military-style weapon that the police say was used in the shootings, has been selling fast here and across the nation.

Before Newtown, the rifles sold for about $1,100, on average. Now some retailers charge twice that. At Pasadena Pawn, on the wall behind glass counters of handguns, are three dozen or so AR-15-style rifles. Dangling from nearly every one is a tag that says “Sold.”

“The AR-15, it’s kind of fashionable,” says Frank Loane Sr., the proprietor.

Read the rest here.  It's quite sobering, and it speaks directly to the challenge at hand.

The Albany Gun Show

I went to the Albany Gun Show last weekend.  Nothing was particularly surprising.  The New York State legislature had pushed through an assault weapons ban a week or so earlier, so there were no Bushmasters to be found anywhere.

The National Guard had a booth, however, and they were allowing people to handle two M-4s (each securely attached to the table with cables).  M-4s are basically the most up-to-date version of the AR-15, the design which inspired the Bushmaster and a slew of other, similar weapons.  I picked one up and it was a pretty compelling in its own way.  I can see the fascination.

It was not nearly as compelling, however, as the Holland & Holland double-barrel elephant rifle I got to handle.  When I first saw it, I thought it was a shotgun.  Closer examination showed that the barrels were way too thin for a shotgun.  It was, in fact, an elephant gun.  If you know anything about H&H, you know they're one of the premium gun manufacturers in the world.  The gun I was holding, which will be auctioned in a couple of months, was estimated at between ten and fifteen thousand dollars.  Which is a lot of gun.

The double-barreled design features two triggers and two firing mechanisms.  The theory being that, if you don't kill the animal with the first shot, you will have likely enraged it.  Moments later it will be running directly at you and the only thing standing between life and death at this point is your ability to get off a clean shot.  The last thing you want is a jam, thus the complete redundancy of barrel, hammer and trigger.

Posting Frequency

This is not one of those blogs where I post things everyday.  A project like this is typically slow on the uptake, although as we accelerate things will happen faster.

Also, a lot of what is going on now is dialogue with public and quasi-public figures.  And since I'm not trying to bust anybody's chops, these conversations are best left, by and large, unreported until something of substance happens.

So don't misconstrue a lack of updates with a lack of effort.

All that said, the Albany gun show is coming up in two weeks, and that should offer plenty to talk about.

Gun One

Gun One has arrived.

A home-made, front-loading, fairly rusty flintlock donated by Richard O. Belanger, shown here on the floor of my studio.

This was the same guy who, upon hearing about the initial rejection of my proposal by the TPD, said something along the lines of "Why even worry about the PD?  Why not just get the guns on the open market?  You can buy old, broken guns for next to nothing."

There's a certain blood-thirsty expedience to this idea, and it might be the best way to get Ball #1 underway, but I feel the message is stronger if the PeaceWork is made from confiscated criminal weapons than from donated, already non-functioning weapons.  So I'm continuing my efforts with city government (although not much gets done through the holidays), with private donations offering a parallel track.

We'll see how it goes.

Good News

If you read enough how-to-be-a-salesman books, one of the persistant themes is that a "no" is just a "yes" waiting to happen.  Or something like that.

So good news:  I just received my first no from the City of Troy.  The rational for the denial stemmed from "laws regulating the disposal of confiscated weapons, none of which allows for destruction" in the manner I'm suggesting.  That said, the letter had an extremely gracious tone and left me feeling pretty good.  After all, who really thought this would be easy?

Plus, the PeaceWorks Project just received its first named members of the Role of Donors.  Earl and Lori Hoellen of Denver, CO.

Merry Christmas.