Guns traded in for food

GARY -- Baptist ministers across northwestern Indiana are encouraging people to give up their guns by offering vouchers for groceries or clothing.\nAnyone who turns in a firearm to Gary police can take the receipt to one of a series of Baptist revivals and exchange it for one of the vouchers.\nPastor Dwight Gardner of Trinity Missionary Baptist Church, the newly elected chairman of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Gary, said he began planning the gun buyback after attending a church conference in Nashville, Tenn., last year.\n"They were asking us to go back to our local churches and communities with four major initiatives. The first was violence in African-American communities," Gardner told the Associated Press.\nForty Baptist churches in the city raised money for the $50 vouchers.\n"We asked member churches to sponsor a minimum of one voucher. That became the seed money. Many churches have done more than one voucher," Gardner said, noting no public funds are involved.\nThe revivals, an annual event, began last week and continue through Thursday. Although most are in Gary, some are as far away as the First Baptist Church of Kingsford Heights, near LaPorte, 20 miles east.\n"A lot of our issues that relate to crime and violence at the root are character and moral-value related," Gardner said. "Inviting people to come and worship extends an opportunity to examine the character and morality of their lives, and perhaps to change their behavior by changing the way they think."\nLake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter conducts gun buybacks annually, offering gift certificates from local businesses in exchange for weapons presented to police throughout the county.