Tired of drab gunmetal blue and black dominating your arsenal? Do a fashion makeover on your weaponry with The Bloomberg Collection of designer gun paints and camouflage.
Wisconsin-based Lauer Custom Weaponry is honoring our hoplophobic mayor with a line of brightly colored paints for each of the 5 boroughs — Manhattan red, Bronx rose, Brooklyn blue, Queens green, and Staten Island orange. They even include a stencil of Mayor Mike’s face for the barrel of the gun.
If urban camouflage is more your taste, Lauer also offers the Bloomberg Collection EZ Camo Kit with a brick-wall-and-graffiti motif for only $129.
Not surprisingly, our ingrateful mayor doesn’t appreciate the tribute. “By coloring these guns, a real one looks like a toy, and a police officer won’t be able to tell the difference,” the mayor huffed.
That’s the same excuse Bloomberg and his nanny-state allies used in 2003, when they tried to ban all toy guns from New York City — until the Manhattan Libertarian Party rode to the rescue.
Of course, it’s a total urban myth that cops are shooting innocent kids because they mistake toy guns for real ones. There’s been exactly one documented incident in NYC since 1994 of a truly innocent child playing with a toy gun and mistakenly being shot. That was in the case of a deaf child playing in a darkened hallway who couldn’t hear the police order him to drop the weapon. The other “children being shot while playing with a toy gun” are inevitably gang-bangers using a fake gun to commit a real robbery.
On the other hand, the police do sometimes mistake a wallet or a cellphone for a gun, with deadly consequences, but so far they haven’t called for a ban on wallets and cellphones.
As of 2006, anyone who uses, buys or sells a gun-coloration kit in New York faces a year in jail or a $1,000 fine.
Here’s a modest proposal: How about the police refrain from shooting their own guns until they have positively identified a lethal threat? And by threat I don’t mean the mere presence of something that may or may not be a gun. Like say, oh I don’t know, a gun barrel pointed at person, the suspect refusing an order to drop the weapon pointed at a person, or bullets emerging from the barrel.