Elizaveta Zlatkis could be jailed for up to a quarter century.
What heinous crime has she committed? Prepare yourself: she kept a stash of guns in her home.
Well, toy guns … used as props.
Not real armaments, pretend armaments.
New York City police confiscated 21 starter pistols and toy replicas that, according to the NYPD’s own lab reports, cannot fire bullets. And “one actual firearm” that the police acknowledge “was rendered ‘inoperable’ because the trigger, hand grip and internal components were all missing.”
“We do videos with them as props,” attests a rapper named Crucial.
“That’s wild,” he says of the prosecution. “They’re fake.”
NYPD cops acted on a tip — standard prelude to many a dastardly home invasion by putative officers of the law — in raiding her home in December 2019.
It’s been a nightmare for Ms. Zlatkis ever since.
She thinks she’s innocent, refusing a plea deal. Meanwhile, the prosecuting attorney, Melinda Katz, won’t drop the charges.
What’s next? Raids of toy stores and movie studio warehouses?
BearingArms.com stresses one aspect of the lunacy: Zlatkis is facing decades behind bars for heaping toy guns while thugs arrested “for actually shooting someone are quickly returning to the streets.”
The guns are fake, and the charges too — if only this story were fake! Unfortunately, it is the believable kind of unbelievable. In the increasingly creedal crusade against guns, the kookier, more cultish element appears to dominate.
The DA and everyone else pursuing this case after the guns had been examined are the ones who should face charges for hounding this woman — not that exercising the right to keep and bear fully functional arms should be a life-destroying offense, either.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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