Hey, remember that time a few weeks ago when Kate and I pronounced Fonderie 47 “Another Contender For The Worst Idea Ever”?  Yeah, us too.

But then a funny thing happened.  We got a couple of emails from alert readers who told us that they disagreed with our assessment, and explained why.  And because there’s nothing we love more than digging around to find out if someone’s wrong on the internet – even if it’s us – we decided to look into the matter further.  After finding conflicting reports about what Fonderie actually does, we emailed them directly:

Dear Fonderie 47,

We are the writers of Wronging Rights, a blog focused on human rights, conflict, and development issues. We recently published a post that was critical of your strategy with regard to AK-47s, based on the article about you in Good. However, other press coverage we’ve encountered since then has suggested that their description was wrong, and you don’t actually purchase the guns yourselves, you just donate the proceeds from your jewelry to an organization that disposes of them.

We certainly don’t want to mislead our readers or describe your organization unfairly. If you’d like to respond to our post, or clarify your strategy, please let us know. We’ll be happy to publish your response as a guest post on the blog.

Best, Amanda Taub & Kate Cronin-Furman

 Soon afterwards we received a response from Peter Thum, one of Fonderie’s founders (try saying that 10 times fast), who politely informed us that we had in fact mischaracterized their program. He accepted our offer to write a guest post clearing up the matter:

Dear Kate and Amanda,

Thank you for inviting us to provide you and your readers with some clarification about our approaches to facilitating the removal and destruction of assault rifles from circulation in Africa and to raising awareness of and action on the issue.

Fonderie 47 creates wearable art pieces – jewelry, watches and accessories—that incorporate steel that is recycled and transformed from AK47 type weapons that we have taken out of circulation in Eastern Congo. We destroyed these original guns for this purpose in Africa and brought the material back to the US, where we further process it for use by the designers and craftspeople who create our pieces. In turn, the sale of each piece funds the destruction of a specific number of weapons back in Africa.

In your post, which I understand was based on an email from one of your readers, you described how Fonderie 47 “buys AK-47s at above-market-prices in conflict zones and turns them into extremely expensive accessories, all in the name of helping Africa.” This depiction is inaccurate. [Editor's note: The email was actually based on this article from Good Magazine, which gives quite a mistaken impression of Fonderie's work]

What we do is sell handmade and limited edition pieces of jewelry that incorporate transformed AK47 material. Each sale funds the destruction of a predetermined number of assault rifles in Africa. Funds from the sale of each piece are then donated to Foundry 47 Foundation, a not for profit, which in turn makes grants to NGOs that perform the weapon destruction programs.

Currently, our grant funding is provided to the Nobel Prize winning, UK-based NGO, Mines Advisory Group, who in turn carry out the technical oversight and physical destruction of the weapons in conjunction with staff of the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These weapons are not as your post stated, “bought at above market prices.” Rather, these assault rifles were collected from conflict by the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the United Nations from combatants who have turned them over as part of the disarmament process at the cessation of combat. Once these weapons are destroyed, the scrap metal, which belongs to the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is recycled locally. The economic arguments about the trade of assault rifles globally and in Africa, which were made by your reader and cited in your post, do not agree with our research. We have found that the average traded price of AK47s in Africa is about ¼ that of the rest of the world and that the average quality of these weapons is extremely low; old, heavily used, poorly maintained. The pricing of the AK47 and its derivatives, which represent about 70% of all assault rifles in Africa, are a good proxy for the pricing of assault weapons in Africa. These guns have a service life of between 20 and 40 years and represent the very low end of the global supply of these weapons. The majority of these weapons arrived in Africa under geopolitical and economic conditions, during and in the years after the Cold War, that no longer exist. They thus are not replaceable at the same cost from stocks or suppliers outside of Africa. The reduction of supplies of these old, poor quality weapons from the continent of Africa therefore means that resupply with significantly higher-priced weapons from newer stocks outside Africa is not possible at a 1:1 rate.

Thank you, Peter Thum CEO and cofounder FONDERIE 47

Thank you, Peter!