To honor Martin Luther King, Jr.'s message of nonviolence, a church in Pittsburgh held a gun buyback event Monday. But while it was slated to last several hours, the event ended a lot earlier than expected.
Why? The response was so overwhelming, the church ran out of money in less than one hour.
The Church of the Holy Cross budgeted $5,100 for the event, and even raised an additional $1,000 throughout the afternoon, but it wasn't enough to keep up with the amount of people who showed up to turn in their guns, WTAE reports.
"We've gotten more assault weapons off the street in less than 40 minutes than we would have imagined," Rev. Torrey Johnson told WTAE. "And so we want to continue to keep the efforts going if we can, but we can't right now because we don't have the money."
The church gave up to $100 per person, depending on the type of firearm being turned in.
But even though the church ran out of funds, some people, like Dan Zilch, turned in their guns anyway.
"Just to get it off the street," Zilch told WTAE. "It was not doing me any good."
According to WTAE, the church collected nearly 150 guns.
