A Mexican Artist Turns Assault Weapons Into Musical Instruments and Art Adele Peters - Fast Company
go to original October 9, 2014

Pedro Reyes creates second generation instruments from dismantled guns. With a team of musicians and new media studio, Cocolab, Reyes has made mechanized instruments from these one-time harmful weapons. (TheCreatorsProject)

As guns from the U.S. pour across the border and fuel violence in Mexico, artist Pedro Reyes uses his work as a peaceful, cathartic form of protest.

There's only one gun store in Mexico, so Mexican drug dealers stocking up on AK-47s tend to look north of the border: Every year, more than 250,000 guns are smuggled in from the U.S. As violence has increased over the last decade - in part thanks to the expiration of the U.S.'s assault weapons ban - artist Pedro Reyes decided to help bring new attention to the problem by making sculptures from melted guns.

"I wanted to make a kind of protest," Reyes says. "A large number of weapons have entered Mexican territory, 90% from the United States. I wanted to turn that around and call attention to the need to stop the flow of weapons to Mexico."

Read the rest at Fast Company

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