WORCESTER – 70 Worcester County residents turned in 134 unwanted guns in six different towns and cities on the morning of Saturday, Dec. 13, as part of the 24th annual Guns 2 Gardens buyback program, which collects firearms and repurposes their pieces into garden tools.
In the lobby of the Worcester Police Department’s headquarters downtown, workers and officers collected three BB guns, six long guns and one pistol over the course of four hours, then brought them to City Welding & Fabrication on Ararat Street to be parted out.
Sitting at one table was Stanley Wojtas, a second-year medical student at UMass Chan Medical School, who kept track of numbers and distributed free gun locks.
“We’re not anti-gun and we’re not anti-gun rights. We’re against gun violence,” Wojtas said. “The more we can do to prevent injury, the better.”
Wojtas said he hopes to become an emergency physician, a job in which he would have to treat gunshot wounds.
In hopes of preventing as many such injuries as possible, he said, he has created two public online maps of the country, one showing gun buyback sites and another showing gun stores that temporarily hold firearms belonging to individuals facing mental health issues.
At City Welding, Guns 2 Gardens founder John Hayden stood by a pile of rifles and explained the process by which they would be split into parts and put to new uses.
“We heat the gun barrel just enough to open it flat and make it into a trowel,” Hayden said. “We use a press to crush the firearms in accordance with ATF regulations. After this point, it’s not a gun anymore. It’s just metal and wood.”
The metal becomes the tool itself, while the stock becomes a wooden handle. According to Hayden, his program distributes the tools to community gardens throughout Worcester County, including the Regional Environmental Council’s urban farm in Main South.
Dr. Michael P. Hirsh, who retired as Worcester medical director the previous day, looked on as a metalworker placed a rifle beneath a 50-ton press in order to separate it into metal and wood.
Hirsh, a longtime pediatric surgeon at UMass Memorial Medical Center, began working in earnest to prevent gun violence in 1981 after a friend and colleague was shot dead in front of the hospital in New York City where they were both in training.
In the following years, he operated on many young patients who had sustained gunshot wounds from unsecured firearms they found at home, and in 2002, he founded Worcester’s gun buyback program.
“Having an unsecured, loaded weapon at home is a public health problem, and that’s what we really want to drive home,” Hirsh told the Telegram & Gazette on Dec. 11.
City Welding served as one of six collection sites, and the other five were police stations in Charlton, Fitchburg, Milford, Northborough and Worcester.
In total, this year’s buyback collected 24 BB guns, 62 long guns, 25 handguns and 23 guns specifically categorized as “auto/semiautomatic,” though most handguns in circulation today are also semiautomatic.
Participants did not have to give their names, present gun registration or show licenses to carry, and the program also accepted ammunition, firearm accessories and guns that no longer work. For each working gun turned in, the program gave out grocery gift cards to Market Basket, Big Y and Target – $50 for a rifle and $100 for a pistol.
One participant at WPD headquarters who declined to give his name said the rifle he was turning in had a long history.
“My dad gave me this when I was 8 years old. I’m 82 now,” he said. “I’ve had the thing for 74 years. It’s been sitting in the closet. I’m not going to go out in the woods with it anymore.”
Hayden said many of the guns that Guns 2 Gardens receives have similar stories, and he and his fellow metalworkers intend to honor that history.
“We respect that these things may have been treasured heirlooms, and that (participants) made a decision that the safety of their household was a treasure,” Hayden said. “We try to make sure each one gets turned into something useful and goes on to a second life in a garden somewhere.”
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