The new Osama bin Laden Halloween masks have arrived, but a New York costume shop owner says he is not selling them to just anyone who walks off the street.
"Not everyone can buy this mask," said Paul Blum, owner of Abracadabra, the mask and costume shop in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, of the bin Laden mask that he had thought up and which arrived on Tuesday.
And he wasn't just talking about the US$95 price tag.
"If they're going to use it to hang him, or put him in an electric chair, fine," Blum said.
"But to wear, to run around to have fun being bin Laden, I don't think so. I'm not going to sell them to people like that at all," he said.
Accordingly, a dummy in the store wearing the rubber mask was strapped into an electric chair, with the headpiece strapped around the faux-bin Laden's turban.
"All right sucker, we're going to fry. Any last words?" cracked Omar, a store employee.
Blum said he planned to interview potential buyers.
He said he would look at them "and see what they had in mind to do with it. And I'll be the judge whether to sell it to them or not."
Customers at the shop, which also features masks of recent US presidents, O.J. Simpson and Austin Powers as well as a host of ghouls and even the Mrs Bates cadaver from the famous Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho, lined up for a chance to slap the bin Laden figure.
And they were nearly universal in saying that they didn't find the mask offensive.
But they all thought any one who wore it on the streets of New York City was taking his life into his own hands.
"Any way we can keep the Halloween spirit alive," said Danielle Ahrens when asked what she thought about the mask, which depicts America's most wanted man as wild-eyed, complete with turban and long, gray-streaked beard.
"Any humor we can find in life is a good thing right now," said Ahrens, who found the mask inoffensive as long as it made bin Laden an object of ridicule or scorn.
"But it's probably not a smart move" to wear it outside, she said.
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