The more than 4,000 guns destroyed in a ceremony at Olympic Stadium in May have been melted down and reshaped into a giant statue of a gun with a knot in the barrel.
“It is nearly finished,” Yi Bunheang, the sculptor, said Wednesday at his Tuol Tumpong workshop.
“This gun has been very difficult to make,” he said. “We have spent four months on it.”
The statue weighs more than 3 tons and is supposed to symbolize peace and security.
“This is a gun only a giant can shoot,” a blacksmith painting the gun gold said.
The sculpture will be placed at the end of the year either in the park near the Cambodian-Japanese Friendship Bridge or somewhere else in the city, said Trak Thai Seing, a senior municipality official.
The confiscation and destruction of arms as well as the creation of an anti-gun statue are part of a nationwide crackdown on weapon ownership. The weapons destroyed for the statue were mostly old and in poor condition.
