The Rev. James E. Curry brought a hammer and tongs to the backyard of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Sunday to show a small crowd how to bang and bend shotgun barrels into garden trowels and spades.
As he fired up a portable forge to turn 7-inch lengths of gun barrels white hot, Curry talked about how his experience working with victims of gun violence and seeing the devastation caused by firearms brought him to the Swords to Plowshares Northeast program.
Curry, a retired Episcopal bishop in Connecticut, co-founded the program with Steve Yanovsky, the communications director of Newtown Action Alliance/The Newtown Foundation, and several others. The effort grew, in part, from the massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.