"Gun store raises hackles in Arlington," blared the Washington Post Metro section headline for Patricia Sullivan's May 26 story. "But neighbors have little recourse to block shop on Lee Highway," lamented the subhead of the page B4 story.
Sullivan devoted 19 paragraphs to the controversy, although as controversies go it seems like quite the nothing-burger. "As of late Monday afternoon" Sullivan reported, a Change.org petition opposing Nova Firearms's planned re-opening in an inside-the-Beltway retail location "had collected more than 1,700 signatures." Fairfax County boasts some 1.1 million residents, so essentially 0.15 percent of the county's population had signed a nationally-circulated online petition on a popular liberal petition website.
What's more, as Sullivan herself noted in the ninth paragraph of the story, the neighborhood in question already has a well-established gun seller in National Pawnbrokers, which has "been selling firearms for years." Indeed, a manager at the pawn shop "who identified himself as David, said gun sales are a steady and uncontroversial part of the business."
So why devote such journalistic resources to this story? Perhaps the answer lies in Sullivan's noting that in "gun-friendly Virginia... the station constitution" prevents local preemption of state laws "governing the purchase, possession, transfer, ownership, carrying, storage or transporting of firearms, ammunition."
"So even in liberal Arlington," Sullivan groused, "gun shops are fair game."
