Bogotanos took the 14,000 firearms collected 2007, melted down on July 9 — International Gun Destruction Day — to create a monument to disarmament in Parque Tercer Milenio, created on the site of El Cartucho, one of the city’s most violent neighborhoods.

The monument showed a man and two women holding up an arc consisting of 12 doves. By early 2010, nine of the twelve doves had been stolen – apparently by the same metal scavengers who steal the city’s sewer lids and sell the metal to scrap dealers.

Some of the weapons were also turned into chairs for classrooms.

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