Fake-gun fine unreal 30G penalty forcing B’klyn store to close

[Paslode]

Fake-gun fine unreal

By DAN MANGAN

Last Updated: 1:32 AM, January 17, 2012

Posted: 12:33 AM, January 17, 2012

Now this is a real stickup!

The owner of a discount store in Brooklyn says the city is holding him up for $30,000 in fines he can’t afford — all because he stocked six toy sheriff sets that included plastic guns.

And now the .44-caliber fines for the orange-tipped, obvious fakes are forcing him to close for good.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Khaled Mohamed, 23, manager of 99¢ Target in Flatlands, which has been ordered to pay a staggering $5,000 fine for each gun offered for sale — the maximum under the law.

The store “cannot pay that fine at all,” said Mohamed, arguing that the punishment imposed on the Utica Avenue odds-and-ends shop is way out of proportion to the violation.

“They’re stopping us from doing any business,” he said.

The store’s lawyer, Andrew Tilem, doesn’t dispute that 99¢ Target was in violation of a city regulation that makes it illegal to sell toy weapons that look too real.

The rule is designed to prevent cops from mistaking the toys for the real thing — and shooting an innocent kid — and to thwart criminals from using them to commit crimes.

Retailers can get around the law by making sure the toy guns are brightly colored.

Tilem and Mohamed said the store initially relied on the word of the gun’s vendor, JMD All Star of New Jersey, that the toys were legal for sale. Then, they said, the prior manager failed to inform store owner Jamal Ahmed that a city inspector had written up the shop.

Because of that failure, Ahmed missed a hearing, which led to the $30,000 fine, Tilem said. The lawyer got Consumer Affairs to reopen the case and negotiate a tentative settlement for about $5,400.

But Ahmed couldn’t afford that either, so he tried his luck at another hearing.

After the store argued that no reasonable person would believe the guns were real, the hearing officer upheld the original fine, as did an appeals judge last week.

Tilem decried the $5,000-per-toy fine, calling it “a really, really abusive penalty.”

But a Consumer Affairs spokeswoman countered, “Realistic-looking imitation guns are illegal and dangerous, and just last week, a 15-year-old in Texas was killed while holding one of these guns.”

dan.mangan@nypost.com

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/b...#ixzz1k0siElUX

The 15 year old had a pellet gun, not one of these....

[mark46th]

Geezus- The Lone Ranger is illegal, now.

[DJ Urbanovsky]

NYC has made it virtually impossible for anybody to do any kind of business whatsoever. It's total BS. Fines. Taxes. Enough legal nonsense to make a lawyer want to eat a bullet. And unless you're rent controlled, it's prohibitively expensive to live there. AND guns and knives are illegal. Eff that, man. And people wonder why I don't do NYCKS. Although now that it's in Jersey...

[cbtengr]

Common sense was thrown out the window a long time ago in some areas of this country. The left and right coasts in particular.

[Streck-Fu]

Originally Posted by cbtengr

Common sense was thrown out the window a long time ago in some areas of this country. The left and right coasts in particular.

Mostly left coast....East Coast idiocy is more isolated to the north east and parts of Florida populated by people from the north east.

[cbtengr]

Originally Posted by Streck-Fu

Mostly left coast....East Coast idiocy is more isolated to the north east and parts of Florida populated by people from the north east.

My apologies to those who reside between Florida and the Northeast!

[Streck-Fu]

Originally Posted by cbtengr

My apologies to those who reside between Florida and the Northeast!

Who are we kidding? Idiocy is everywhere.....

I think the real fear is that some of these toys might wind up south of the border in the hands of violent cartels.

[Ghost_Team]

The more I read about shit like this, the happier I am that I am not growing up now. I distinctly remember running around with toy guns, playing lawn darts, riding a bike without a suit of armor, and being told at 10am on Saturdays during the summer to be home by the time the streetlights came on.

It would seem that nowadays it is all well and good to sit home and become a couch potato playing video games so graphic and violent that had they been a movie, they would have had an R rating (and that's being conservative), but not to actually play war, or cops & crooks, or cowboys & Indians.

Granted, I don't have kids, but the more I hear and read about stuff, the more I just have to shake my head about shit like this.

If you are worried about your kid getting shot by a cop for waving around a toy gun, make sure you tell the kid never to point a gun at a cop.

Anybody got an inside line on when the funeral will be for Mr. Common Sense? I get the feeling he died a while ago, and hopefully they'll be done desecrating his corpse soon.

[Gypsy]

Originally Posted by Ghost_Team

Anybody got an inside line on when the funeral will be for Mr. Common Sense? I get the feeling he died a while ago, and hopefully they'll be done desecrating his corpse soon.

My favorite saying...I'd declare common sense dead but I can't find the body.