A screening of the 2016 documentary “Newtown” was held in Harrison on Nov. 21; although purely coincidental, the timing seemed apropos as the issue of gun control has recently surfaced in the Westchester community.
The film, which documents the shooting of 20 children, ages 6 and 7, and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and the emotional trauma that ensued, was featured in the Sundance Film Festival and the South by Southwest Film Festival. The film was directed and co-produced by Kim Snyder and released in January 2016, three years after the shooting in December 2012. To date, Sandy Hook stands as the deadliest mass shooting of schoolchildren in American history.
“It’s a film about grief, and about trauma and coping as a community,” said Marie Cuomo Cole, one of the film’s producers, adding that besides the issue of gun control, community resilience was one of the biggest themes which she hoped to address in producing the documentary.
Whether because of the degree of emotional suffering the film depicts or its timeliness to issues currently in Harrison, the screening drew tears from its audience. “I feel like Newtown could have been Harrison; it could have been Rye,” Cuomo Cole said. “It could have been any-and-every-town, U.S.A. I think that’s what really struck so many people about the tragedy.”
According to Galina Chernykh, the Harrison Public Library’s executive director, the screening was set up several months ago; but the timing of the event seems appropriate, as an ongoing debate over L&L Sports, a gun store that opened on Harrison’s Halstead Avenue in early November, continues to draw significant amounts of attention. An online petition on Change.org protesting the location of the store, which is less than 1,000 feet from an elementary school, has nearly 3,500 signatures, as of press time.
“I think the response has been, at the onset, prudent,” Cuomo Cole said about the local issue in Harrison. “It’s important to check out the sellers. There are many bona fide, acceptable sellers and there are those that are not, so I think that the caution is well-supported.”
The controversy over the store’s opening has even led neighboring communities to mobilize.
In the city of Rye, a gun committee has been formed in the wake of the Harrison saga, which aims to promote gun safety measures and may look to establish zoning tactics to put stricter regulation on where a gun store can be located. And in the village of Rye Brook, a draft legislation is being proposed that would also look to regulate where gun shops could be located.
The success of local laws could eventually have ramifications for Westchester as a whole.
If any of those potential laws garner enough support on the local level, Westchester County Legislator Catherine Parker, a Rye Democrat, said she may consider proposing one on the county level. “It should be on notice that this is something that we should certainly look into, and doing something on a county level would be fantastic; but I don’t think the county executive [Rob Astorino] would support it,” she told the Review.
Parker referred to legislation proposed in June to reinstate a ban on gun shows at the Westchester County Center which was enacted in 2000 under then-County Executive Andrew Spano, a Democrat. Astorino, a Republican who took over as county executive in 2010 after defeating Spano, repealed the ban that year.
The contentious fight over gun control is evident in “Newtown”; Cuomo Cole is no stranger to school shootings, having previously produced a documentary on the mass shootings at Virginia Tech. In 2010, she was a producer of the film “Living for 32,” a documentary about the push for gun control legislation after the 2007 shooting of 32 students at Virginia Tech.
A similar surge in gun control laws also occurred after Newtown.
Just a month after that tragedy, Cuomo Cole’s brother, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, signed the Safe Act into law in New York state. That law widened the definition of assault rifles, put stricter limits on magazine capacities, and put tighter restrictions on the background check system in the state.
The Safe Act also included an amendment to the Mental Hygiene Law, requiring mental health professionals to report patients who they considered could be hazardous to themselves or others if they possessed a gun. Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old Sandy Hook shooter who also took his own life during the event, had been diagnosed with several behavioral and cognitive disorders, including Asperger’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and sensory-integration disorder, according to his father, Peter Lanza.
