Wear It Don't Bear It

This article was contributed by 2010 Scarsdale High School Alumni Toby Milstein: When news of the shootings this past summer in Aurora, Colorado surfaced, I like all other Americans, was devastated. Though I am from Scarsdale and was not personally impacted by the massacre, I felt the sorrow of my fellow Americans as if it were my own and wanted to do something about it. In the fashion and art world, guns have been a perennially popular symbol of status and power. Immediately, we can think of Andy Warhol's pop-art guns and most recently, our twenty-first century's fetishization of guns (and other dark symbols such as skulls) in jewelry such as that of Jennifer Fisher's sold-out gun pistol necklace, and celebrities like Whitney Cummings, Lindsay Lohan and Rihanna who sport gun necklaces. Moreover, in 2008, Chanel produced very popular shoes with the heel as a gun that Madonna wore to a movie premiere.

I struggled to grapple with the dichotomy of this object as a chic, fashion symbol and the gun as a lethal weapon.

With that in mind, I designed a pendant with the slogan, Wear it Don't Bear It. It's one thing to wear a gun as a fashion/art symbol and it's another to use it for what it was intended for-as a killing machine; hence the catchy Wear it Don't Bear it motto. It also functions to say that we should wear and promote the latter statement: Don't Bear It (it being a gun, of course). My charm has unfortunately become even more relevant after the heinous murder of twenty first-graders and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut on Friday.

In addition from support in the U.S., there has been a lot of interest in the charms from Norway. Ten charms have already been sold to Norwegians who want to show support for grief-stricken American families and those suffering in Oslo after the shootings that left 77 dead last July. Plus I have garnered the support of acclaimed music producer and songwriter, Billy Mann, and The Chancellor of the NY State Board of Regents, Dr. Merryl H. Tisch.

The charms are available here for $25.00 each and 100 percent of the profits from the sales will go to an organization called "The Bereaved Parents of the USA," a non-profit that offers support to grief-stricken family members attempting to rebuild their lives after the loss of a family member

Make a statement about guns by wearing your own "Wear It Don't Bear It" charm and support a good cause. Get yours here: