by Dave Workman
Mayor Rose of Sussex, NJ.
Senior Editor
The part-time mayor of a small northwest New Jersey community added insult to injury by not only turning down an invitation to join Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), but by also making his allegiances clear.
He belongs to the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and National Rifle Association (NRA), and is—in his own words—“committed to giving gun rights (my) political support.” Jonathan Rose, 32, was elected mayor of Sussex, NJ, last fall after having served a couple of terms on the city council. A Republican, Rose is an accomplished hunter and gun owner who learned one night a few years ago the value of a firearm for personal protection.
He told TGM that he had hunted as a youngster, but when he was about 24 years old, after purchasing his first house, he arrived one day to find that it had been burglarized and he lost several valuable tools from the garage.
When police arrived to take a report, he was advised that the culprits might come back to steal other tools that were inside the house. Rose stayed there that night unarmed, and he thought all night long about what might happen if the burglars returned. The next night, he was armed with a shotgun borrowed from his father.
“For the first time,” he said in a telephone interview, “I realized the comfort that comes from knowing I could defend myself.” Rose is a private contractor who deals with computer issues, and his service as a part-time mayor fits well with his small town lifestyle. Born in the Sussex region, he grew up there and put himself through Rutgers University while working as an auto mechanic and later as a machinist. He now has degrees in Computer Science, Physics and Mathematics.
Within weeks of his election as mayor last fall, Rose recalled, the invitation from MAIG arrived.
“I don’t really like that organization much,” he said, “and they’ve been on the wrong side of gun issues. I don’t like their position on person-to-person gun transfers, the so-called gun show loophole.” His decline was polite but terse, and the next thing he did was contact SAF.
Rose is something of a rare politician in New Jersey, where it is unusual for a municipal leader to voice support for gun ownership and Second Amendment rights. He told TGM that he has two carry permits, one from Florida and the other from Connecticut. Neither is good in New Jersey, and he acknowledged that getting a permit in the Garden State is extremely difficult.
Despite the state’s onerous gun laws, however, he does own several firearms, including handguns, rifles and shotguns. He remains an avid hunter, and has even traveled to Hungary to shoot pheasants. In a note, he wrote, “A favorite winter Saturday would involve bagging a deer in the morning, dropping it off at the local German butcher to be turned into venison sausage, and then taking his chainsaw to a few trees to turn into firewood that afternoon.”
