Gu Jiao, the Chinese owner of America's oldest gun shop
Staff Reporter 2013-01-24 17:19
Wax on, wax off: Gu Jiao sure loves his guns. (Photo/CNA)
The owner of the John Jovino Gun Shop, purportedly the oldest gun retailer in America, is a Chinese man from Shanghai, reports Taiwan's Central News Agency.
The shop is a firearms dealer and factory located on Grand Street in New York City's Little Italy. It was founded in 1911 by John Jovino, who sold it to the Imperato family in the 1920s, and claims to be the oldest gun shop in the whole country.
The store's current owner is a 65-year-old Chinese man known as Gu Jiao, the pen name he formerly used working as the Hong Kong correspondent for the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily.
Gu, who has also served in the US Army and the New York City Police Department, says not many people know his real name, Wu Jie. He was working in New York's Chinese-language media industry when he visited the gun store for a story and struck up a friendship with the store's owner at the time.
Gu later began working for the store and eventually took over the business when the owner retired, becoming reportedly the first Chinese person to own a gun shop in the United States.
Gu said it was very difficult for him to get licensed because of his Chinese background and the fact that he once worked for a Communist Party newspaper, adding that he had to go through numerous background checks as well as blood and urine tests.
The tightening of gun laws in New York in recent years has affected sales to some extent, although he continues to have a steady stream of clients from the police department, federal agencies and foreign diplomats, he said.
Having clients from law enforcement agencies also means that business is unlikely to be affected by potential new gun laws, including those proposed by President Barack Obama on Wednesday in response to the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting that took the lives of 20 children and six adults last month.
AS may be expected, Gu is against more stringent gun laws and is a believer of the saying that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." The real problem is not whether people have the right to own guns, it's whether gun owners have a sense of responsibility to society, he said.
