The United States has the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. As Jill Lepore writes in The New Yorker, “one in three Americans owns a gun, typically more than one.” This country has the highest rate of gun violence among wealthy nations, and one of the highest rates overall. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 39,773 people died from gun-related injuries in the US in 2017—almost 3,000 more than perished in car crashes. And because of political pressure to restrict research on gun violence, it’s likely that the statistics we have don’t tell the whole story.

Active shooter incidents of all types have become increasingly common in the US in recent years, and news reports of mass shootings are becoming all too frequent: we’ve all seen coverage of the multiple-victim tragedies at the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado; the spas in Atlanta, Georgia; and the VTA light rail yard in San Jose, California, among a growing list. The toll this type of large-scale violence takes is greater than the body count; it harms entire families and communities. Advocates of gun control point to easy access to guns as a factor that contributes to mass shootings; others point out large-scale social and mental-health stressors.

It’s in helping individuals and communities move through the complex emotional aftermath of these incidents that public artists have most often risen to the occasion and made their greatest contributions. One artist, for example, collects returned guns, then melts and recasts the metal into new tools. In another project a design group, working with a public artist, created a memorial that honors the lives of those lost to gun violence.

In 2007, artist Pedro Reyes proposed a campaign inviting the voluntary turnover of weapons in exchange for coupons redeemable for home appliances and electronics. The project, titled Palas por Pistolas (“Shovels for Guns”), was developed as a response to the high rate of deaths by gunshot in Culiacán, a city in western Mexico.

The project resulted in the collection of 1,527 weapons, nearly half of which were automatic weapons. All were steamrolled and melted. This raw material was transformed into 1,527 shovels, with each handle bearing the story of the shovel’s origin.

Reyes describes this process as a kind of alchemy: “Simultaneous with the physical conversion of a substance, a psychological transformation is supposed to occur,” he says. The transformation continued when these shovels were used to plant 1,527 trees at art institutions and schools around the world, in San Francisco, Paris, Denver, and other cities. “As children use former weapons to plant trees...they engage in a concrete activity that is positive, but also in a ritual that builds trust,” says the artist.

Of course, removing a specific number of guns from one city won’t stop the violence. But Reyes is seeking a cultural shift in the way we understand guns, and he believes this project is a step in that direction. “A cultural rejection of weapons as an industry must come about,” he says, “if we want to see real change in the prevalence of guns.”