| SamuelRSmith said: At 5:30 a.m. on May 10, armed men broke into the bedroom of Kirk Kyle Farrar’s 12 year-old daughter and shook her awake. The men led her downstairs at gunpoint and forced her to lie on the floor next to her mother and father, with her hands behind her head. Another armed man took Farrar’s two-year-old son from his crib, and would not let his parents hold him. “My son screamed for his mother for what seemed like an eternity,” Farrar wrote in an email to friends, obtained by Reason. “I will never forget the hopeless feeling of not being able to comfort my son or daughter.” The men were federal and local police officers, and they were arresting Farrar for selling bongs and glass pipes. http://reason.com/blog/2012/05/20/a-report-from-obamas-humane-drug-war-my |
It is illegal to sell or possess drug paraphernalia in the US. If the shop privately was selling items as bongs and pipes, but publically selling them as "tobacco water pipes" then they were knowingly selling them for the purposes of assisting someone in the commission of a crime.
If a gun shop owner sells advertises a gun as a "widow maker" and a woman comes in the shop, purchases the gun with the expressed (to the shop owner) purpose of killing her husband, should the gun owner be responsible (in part) for a crime of murder if the woman goes home and shoots her husband?
Whether you like it or not, there is a responsibility to every shop owner selling something that has both a legal purpose and an illegal purpose, to prevent the sale when something is knowingly going to be used by someone for illegal purposes. Otherwise it's negligence. And if someone goes out of their way to make people know they can use something for an illegal purpose, they're complicit in the crime.
My guess is publically the shop owner may have been selling "tabacco water pipes", but privately (i.e. to interested customers they trusted) selling them as bongs and pipes for drug use.
