MOHAMED
UNLAWFUL: The city says this obviously fake toy gun is too real. (
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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.”