What would prevent some nutty Islamofascist supporter using his cute kid - or his neighbor's cute kid -to dispense poison to everybody in Central Park?
By the time everybody figured out the source of the poison, the kid would be long gone.
But if the kid had been required to pull a permit & at least provide some documentated identification (you know, like a long form Birth Certificate,lol!) before she could sell drinks or food to people in the park, there would at least be a place to start an investigation if people starting dropping dead.
And what if it were just an unintentional poisoning - e coli or salmonella contamination or something else, say. There'd be no way for health officials to track the source down without a permitting process which is strictly adhered to equally across the board with no favortisim for cute kids or crazed terrorists.
If we were to make it optional to pull a permit to sell food to the public in Central Park, we sumultaneously open a Pandora's Box of risk to the public.
I can't help but suspect that if we were reading here about hundreds of people becoming deathly ill from a spoiled batch of lemonade because food handling protocols had not been scrupulously followed that we'd all be screaming for public health officials heads here, no?
You make a good case but it is based on the supposition that this would be a possible way for mass murder. I am not sure that hundreds flocks to Lemonade stands.
But the whole point of course it to make sure that the enforcement commissars use common sense and reasonable discretion. They didn’t do that here. The notion that Islamofascists would use a 10-year old kid for mass poisoning is the same reason the TSA gives for a comprehensive search of grandmas in wheelchairs.
and yet children have been doing this for decades...even after 911, and there hasn’t been a single episode of lemonade stand poisoning.. boy are you paranoid...