Isbella Diaz
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON — (WMAL) The McLean Citizens Association (MCA) Board will have a meeting Wednesday evening to discuss the current predicament involving a new gun shop and a local elementary school.
Franklin Sherman Elementary School is located right behind the newly-opened NOVA Firearms in McLean. Local community members started protesting the gun store soon after its open. Some parents claim they are even pulled their kids out of school as a result of threats they received because of the protests.
NOVA Firearms owner James Gates said the shop officially opened up about two weeks ago to about 120 protesters. Even so, Gates said the protesters haven’t quite had the negative affect they were probably hoping for.
“To be honest, they made us more popular,” Gates said. “They brought in more business than they would have stopped.”
Fairfax County Board of Supervisors member John Foust has publicly said he wants to convince the shop owners to relocate.
Even so, NOVA Firearms does have the legal right to set-up shop under the county zoning ordinance. Foust admits as much, but still says he thinks keeping the store open at its current location is a bad idea.
“It’s simply antagonistic to our community and frightening to concerned parents to locate a store selling firearms and live ammunition within 60 seconds walking distance to a school entrance,” Foust said.
Gates said he’s confused by Foust’s sudden disapproval of the store, as the NOVA Firearms business has been in McLean for two years.
“He has never come and talked to us, never had a problem with us being less than a quarter mile from where we are now. That’s where our old shop was,” Gates said.
However, Foust isn’t the only county member who disapproves of the shop’s location.
“This is commercial property. Franklin Sherman is bordered on two of its sides of commercial property,” admitted Janie Strauss, a Fairfax County School Board member. “But I still feel this is not an appropriate place for a gun store.”
“I disagree,’ said Gates. “There is a 6-foot tall fence between us and them. The playground cannot see our store….and even if they could see the store, it’s just a building. No guns in the window. They can’t see our signage…it’s our back parking lot.”
Gates said he is doing everything within county ordinances and everything “is by the book.”
“I don’t see the correlation of the gun shop location to the school being any kind of harm to the students or the teachers,” said Gates.
If anything, said Gates, the shop would be providing basic safety classes to the area, making McLean more secure. Gates said local, state and federal law enforcement officers that attend constantly will even have a better reaction time to get to the school if anything bad were to happen in the area.
NOVA Firearms
NOVA Firearms has been around since 2009. The store was in Falls Church for a few years, then changed location to McLean two years ago.
Gates first tried to open up a store in Arlington. He faced heavy backlash from the local community, with protests on even the surrounding stores in the shopping center where the gun store was set to be.
Protesters soon threatened to boycott the entire shopping center, prompting its owner to break the lease with NOVA Firearms.
“Once they pulled our Arlington lease, we started looking around in McLean for somebody that was gun-friendly,” said Gates.
They finally decided on their current location because it had a great customer base and the shop seemed to be welcomed.
“You know how hard it is to find a space that’s gun-friendly, zoned for commercial retail as well as firearms, and had the space and affordability that we could do?” asked Gates.
Now it seems history is repeating itself, and the store is facing the same backlash it did in Arlington. But this time, it’s a little different: the shop is already open. It will be harder for the store owner to pull the lease on NOVA.
“It wasn’t until we were about to sign the lease that we realized that the school and I share a boundary,” explained Gates.
“If I could have picked a different location, I would have. I would not have intended and purposely put the store next to a school if I could have helped it.”
The MCA meeting will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the McLean Community Center.
Copyright 2015 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: NOVA Firearms/Yelp)
