I had a great conversation with Rocco Gaspari Sr. yesterday.

Actually I had called the Lower Chichester Township building looking for his son. That would be Rocco Gaspari Jr. He’s the president of the Lower Chi commissioners.

The Gaspari family is not happy with us right now. In particular they’re ticked at our columnist, Gil Spencer, and the piece he did in the Sunday paper.

Rocco Jr. called and left me a voice-mail Monday morning. He wasn’t around when I called back, but they did put hook me up with Rocco Sr., who served the township for decades as both a commissioner, head of the local GOP, and a longtime magisterial district judge. Another son, Thomas, is the police chief.

In his voice-mail, Rocco Jr. took issue with Gil’s Sunday column, in which he criticized a proposal by the Lower Chi commissioners to enact an ordinance that would require residents to divulge the firearms in their homes.

A couple of things here: This is only a proposal. The board hasn’t voted on it yet.

Gil does not think much of the ordinance, much as he was not a terribly big fan of two previous issues that have popped up in Lower Chi, that being settting the speed limit on some roads, and whether they can make using a hand-held cell phone while driving illegal.

Me? I don’t have a problem with any of these issues. I try not to speed. It aggravates me to no end the number of drivers I have to avoid as they wander all over the road while chatting on cell phones, and I don’t own any guns.

Gil doesn’t see it quite that way. And he’s not alone. In particular, as you might have guessed, the National Rifle Association is not looking especially kindly on the latest Lower Chi initiative.

Gil made that pretty clear in his column.

But that’s not really what seems to have ticked off the Gasparis. Both junior and senior said they objected to the tone of some of Gil’s depictions of their family, to the point where they believe there is an anti-Italian bias at work. Or at the very least an anti-Gaspari sentiment.

I had a good conversation with Rocco Sr. I assured him we have no Italian bias. And that the criticism the family gets is because of the nature of the positions they hold in the township. I think he believed me. We agreed to talk about it some more.

I still don’t think he cares much for Gil, or for what he wrote.

He’s not the first to hold that opinion. Notice that word there. Opinion. That’s what Gil’s job is. He’s not supposed to straddle the line, as a reporter would do. In fact I want him to do just the opposite, to tell us exactly what he thinks of local issues.

That’s what he did on the latest initiative in Lower Chi.

The Gasparis didn’t much care for it. They aren’t the first to feel that way. No doubt they won’t be the last.