By David Hodes
Arlington resident Susan Newton, 48, married, a senior manager at a nonprofit in the District and a mother of two kids in the Arlington public school system, decided to take a stand against guns. She created a petition in May through Change.org to convince a building landlord to not allow a gun shop in a small strip mall building in the Cherrydale area just blocks away from two elementary schools, saying that the citizens were “alarmed” and calling the location of the shop near schools “unconscionable.” Her petition resulted in the support of 2,689 people, mostly Arlington neighbors, and the permit for the gun shop being denied in July. (James Gates, the owner of the gun shop, Nova Firearms, was contacted but did not reply to an invitation for an interview).
NVM: What inspired the petition?
Susan Newton: I became a little more active over the last maybe two years regarding the schools and living in Arlington, having school-aged children. So I was paying more attention to what was going on in the community. One thing is that if you care about something, you need to say something, or you shouldn’t sit back and then complain that things are not the way you want them to be. I think that was my motivation. I just couldn’t believe that a gun shop was going to be located close to schools and places where families come on weekends and after school. It did not seem like a good fit for our community. I wanted to say something, and the thought of starting a petition just popped into my head.
NVM: Were you surprised by the support you got?
SN: I was. When we got a couple hundred people supporting the petition, I was like, “Wow. OK. That’s great.” Then when it got into thousands, I was even more surprised.
NVM: What sort of reaction did you have from those who opposed this petition?
SN: I did receive a lot of online comments personally identifying me as the one who started the petition. There was a lot of name-calling. The discourse turned quickly into name-calling. I was a little surprised that people who don’t even know me had an idea of my intelligence level or level of detail or knowledge of the issue and were ready to immediately start telling me that I had no knowledge about what I was speaking about. There were even some out-of-state people responding, so I saw that this caught some national attention. I never anticipated that.
NVM: As a longtime Arlington resident, have you seen changes in how residents respond to social hot-button issues like this?
SN: Arlington has always been active on these issues. But I do think that there has been a groundswell of people wanting to come out and say that they don’t accept what the status quo is and that they want to have a voice. The rise of the Internet and different technologies and social media tools have really changed how you get your opinion out. You can really form communities online, which is not something that would have happened to me 15 years ago. Now I can find supporters and connect quickly. I think opinions about gun control have changed. I know within my circle of supporters that they absolutely really feel frustrated that the gun culture seems to have roots and is just so embedded that we can’t do anything about it. “The culture is the way it is,” they say. And I think people are tired of that message. They are saying we should be able to have a choice as well. We have a right to not be exposed to guns.
NVM: And here we are in the wake of yet another school killing, creating more discussion and more proposed solutions.
SN: While I respect the Second Amendment, my community reflects my values of not wanting to have an active gun shop operating or further promoting the culture of guns in my community. Hopefully if you can have enough people talking about that, people speaking intelligently and reasonably and saying there are rights on both sides, maybe that can help stop the stalemate that we seem to have reached right now.
( January 2016 )
