Activist blacksmith teaches gun violence survivors to melt down guns and turn them into farm implements

Is that from Farming Simulator 19?

I just discovered a bunch of play break the physics videos on YouTube last week and found them endlessly hilarious.

Yeah, but you see farriers and hobby smiths all the time with the bottom of their forges all torn up from shit that melted on them when they weren’t paying attention. Steel will melt in an atmospheric forge.

Yes, it is terrible when one’s head is ripped off because they were lathing in formal attire.

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Um, some of us do…

But yeah, not with venturi burners. Forced air will do it though :slight_smile: (tamahagane and wootz are fun projects :slight_smile: )

With a Silicon Carbide crucible and a small forced air blown furnace you can melt almost anything you want.

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I keep thinking about a memorial, or several, made from guns donated by gun owners after each “mass” shooting. One gun for each victim, melted down and cast into something sad and beautiful. With names. Something to always remind us of the cost of someone’s “freedom.”

Yes, there’s a large backlog at this point. Do you think there are enough gun owners willing to part with a weapon for each murdered child? We wouldn’t even have to include adults until the children had been remembered. Maybe near the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, if there was sufficient room.

Anyone know an artist who’d be interested?

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It’s a powerful idea, and my circle of friends includes sculptors … I will float this around and ping you if something happens.

For future reference, I have created a “Melt the Guns Memorial” page in my Gnomon Chronicles wiki:

http://gnomonchronicles.com/wiki/Melt_the_Guns_Memorial_(nonfiction)

Update: added “wiki”.

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Thank you. It seems an appropriate act to me; I’ll try to spread the idea further myself…

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This really made my day.
A better tomorrow…

I had an acquaintance (we weren’t friends but we were in the same social circle) in high school that is a survivor of a particularly horrific shooting. His father shot both him and his mother, then killed two responding police officers before killing himself. He and his mother survived, and I lost touch with him after high school. Even though we were just acquaintances, the whole incident still profoundly affected me.

Recently through a friend of a friend on Facebook, I learned that part of the way he has found to cope with this tragedy is through political activism, and confronting his trauma head-on by becoming a champion marksman.

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