Hundreds of guns seized by the Cook County sheriff each year may soon be melted down, turned into jewelry and sold, with a cut of the profits turned over to a Chicago anti-violence program.
Sheriff Tom Dart announced the new initiative — a partnership with a firm called Liberty United — at a Chicago Ideas Week event Wednesday night.
Liberty United, a for-profit venture founded by Peter Thum, a socially conscious entrepreneur who created Ethos Water, turns guns seized by police in Philadelphia and Syracuse, N.Y., into cuff links, rings and necklaces. A pair of sword and plowshare earrings — a reference, Thum said in a phone interview Wednesday, to the biblical admonition to beat swords into plowshares — goes for $225.
Under the program, 25 percent of the profits made on the jewelry would go to Children’s Home + Aid, a nonprofit that among other things works to reduce violence on Chicago’s West Side and in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side, said Ben Breit, a sheriff’s spokesman.
“We’re taking guns that would otherwise be incinerated and turning them into something beautiful while benefiting a local organization working on the front lines to stop the bloodshed,” Dart said in a statement.
Firearms taken from drug houses or found while serving evictions — and never claimed in either case — will now be sent to Liberty United, Breit said. A relatively few weapons would also come from criminal cases after a defendant’s appeals have run their course and a judge orders the firearm destroyed, he said.
Currently, the guns are taken to a facility where they are incinerated, Breit said.
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