From The Brother's Brick Blog: "Put yourself in Jeremy Bell’s shoes. You’re a creative director at Teehan+Lax, a Downtown Toronto design firm and a lifelong LEGO fan. You’re having a quiet Tuesday afternoon at the office. Hey, you just got a custom BrickGun model kit of a semi-auto handgun in the mail. Why not build it at your desk? (I for one totally understand, I just did the same thing last week with the Space Police Smash ‘n’ Grab.) After you’re done, you show the model to a co-worker, he breaks it, you put it back in its box, then unwind with some co-workers by playing video games.

The problem is, handguns are illegal in Canada, and gun play at work is generally associated with disgruntled employee rampages, rather than good LEGO design. So that afternoon, a person with a condo overlooking Jeremy’s window office saw him assembling the model, thought it was a real handgun and called the police. (He has since apologize via Twitter, Facebook and a handmade sign put up in his window.)

About an hour after putting away the model gun, the gaming was interrupted by yelling in the hallway. Jeremy peeked into the hall and saw members of the Toronto Police Emergency Task Force with real big guns pointed at him. He cooperated, got ‘cuffed, told them to check out the LEGO gun in his office, and he was uncuffed in about 90 seconds. Done, right?

It became a slightly bigger deal because people in and immediately around the building were detained, had big guns pointed at them, the street was closed off by half a dozen police cars, a couple ambulances waited nearby, and a helicopter hovered overhead. For details on the basic facts of the story, the best details and perspective are in Jeremy's Blog..."

"From looking at BrickGun’s website, they’re a little overwhelmed by the media driven orders because of this story, so if this gets you all excited to order something from them, good luck trying to get it in time for the holidays."

Good for BrickGun! It's nice to see such a bad story turn into such a positive in the form of business publicity!

This isn't the first time such negative press has arisen over "scandalous" lego creations. One only need search for "Osama Bin Lego" to catch the story from December 4, 2008, just under a year ago in which The Sun ran roughshod over the facts and played to the irrational fears of people who have nothing better to do than complain about "gun toting terrorist toys". The year old story was in regard to BrickArms.com, a designer of quality Lego compatible guns and other weapons, who just sell the weapons and have nothing to do with how people use them after the fact.

Moral of the story? Government may promote violence through war and militarized police raids, which is perfectly acceptable and socially upright...But dare not suggest a toy model is anything but the devil's plaything else you and your friends or coworkers deserve to be detained, cuffed, and have automatic rifles pointed at you!

Your resident Lego enthusiast!

Pep