New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence (NMPGV) presents a Gun to Gardens Event:

New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence invites the public to a free event that celebrates life over death, love over hate and art over guns.  

Join Mayor Javier Gonzales, author Valerie Plame, poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, sculptor Jeremy Thomas, gun violence survivors and RawTools on October 7th from 5:30 pm to 7:oo pm for an evening of music, poetry, and art at The Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA), 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe.  Art made from gun scraps by SFCC welding and art students and faculty will be on display. Music by Eileen and the In-Betweens.

*The art made from gun scraps will be auctioned off at Form and Concept at their Guns to Art Benefit Show on November 17 from 4:00 to 7:00.

There will be a demonstration of a firearm used in suicide being forged into a garden tool. The mother, Santa Fe native, Jill Benjamin will receive the gardening tool and speak on the issue of gun violence.  http://rawtools.org/what-we-do/  

Santa Fe, NM: New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence (NMPGV) invites the public to a free event to see what NMPGV is doing with New Mexico’s unwanted guns for our gun buybacks.  For the past year, NMPGV has been conducting gun buybacks throughout Northern New Mexico. These guns are being repurposed into art and gardening tools.

Jimmy Santiago Baca will be reading from his new book that addresses gun violence. Baca, a vocal advocate for gun violence prevention says, “Gun violence has too long been the easy option to resolving differences, to enhancing inadequacies in individuals better suited for counseling and anger management, it’s been the pet-lap poodle of the gun lobbyist which continues to foster, by spending billions on advertising, a sort of hypnotic belief that guns can compensate for our fears and lack of courage. It’s nothing short of insane and we are all asylum patients to this monstrous communal lobotomy that has been inflicted on us.”

New Mexico just became the seventh deadliest state for gun deaths. Children in New Mexico aged 0 – 19 are killed by guns at a rate almost 60 percent higher than the national average. Youth in New Mexico are likely to commit suicide at a rate 75 percent higher than the national average – more than half of these suicides will involve a firearm.