According to the SF Gate, High Bridge Arms, the last gun shop in San Francisco, will soon become a medical marijuana dispensary.
Located in the trendy Bernal Heights neighborhood, the store sold guns for 63 years, before closing last October over opposition to new rules that would have required the shop to videotape gun sales and report ammunition purchases.
Last week, 7×7.com reported that the shop’s new tenant plans to open a free-to-the-poor marijuana dispensary, called High Bridge, in its place—pending approval by the city’s planning commission. Sean Killen, the new pot shop’s owner, said that the landlord is “very happy, quite frankly that a cannabis store is going in there.”
In February, Killen’s medical cannabis dispensary application was accepted by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and now, he’s hoping to raise community support in advance of his planning hearing this month.
Killen, a San Jose native, began managing the Bernal Heights Cooperative last fall, but the shop is now facing eviction from its building to make way for a fancier dispensary. Regardless, Killen plans to keep the collective’s mission to provide the community with “a compassionate and safe cannabis program” alive through his latest non-profit operation. High Bridge will reportedly focus on keeping pot prices low and giving it away to patients who can’t afford it. According to 7×7.com, Killen also “intends to push the city to mandate free cannabis for low-income residents, just as Berkeley did the fall of 2014.”
Killen told the website that a lot of stray bullets were found during renovations and that reopening San Francisco’s last gun shop to sell America’s alleged “most dangerous” plant is sweet.
“[The poetry’s] not missed on us whatsoever,” he said.
(Photo Courtesy of KQED News)
