Gunning for trouble
A recent story in this paper told how Ukiah police arrested someone for possessing a zip gun. A zip gun! One might have thought those were last on the street during the Eisenhower administration (or maybe when “West Side Story” was still on Broadway). But no, right here in our fair city.
It brought back memories of another story, years ago, when a minor was arrested for possessing a baseball bat. Even though millions of kids have been swinging baseball bats for more than a century, this student got into trouble because he admitted the bat wasn't for baseball, but “protection.”
At one time, all of this was prohibited by a single, neat statute, Penal Code section 12020. But over the years, it's been replaced by a whole host of laws dealing with “prohibited weapons” — under the Legislature's policy, “If you can add more laws, by all means do so.” Even if that means taking one statute and breaking it up into lot of littler ones.
And the whole “prohibited weapons” part of the Penal Code (now found in sections 16100 to 17360) attests as much to criminals' (and the Legislature's) ingenuity as anything else.
The law generally prohibits “Unlawful Carrying and Possession of Weapons.” As originally enacted in 1953, it prohibited the most common weapons in the criminal's arsenal — blackjacks, “slungshots” (what everyone else would call a “slingshot”), and a billy (such as a baseball bat used for “protection”), metal knuckles, and a “dirk or dagger.”
Most of these are just one step removed from the schoolyard (even Dennis the Menace, after all, carried a slingshot in his back pocket). And, except for dirks and daggers, most of them, like blackjacks, are used to hit someone over the head.
Indeed, the Legislature apparently thought most of these terms were so self-explanatory that it didn't even bother to define them. Consequently, there is a long body of case law in which the courts have had to tell us that a “billy” is “a bludgeon, as one for carrying in the pocket.” The courts have also helpfully explained that, “Since a baseball bat, whether broken or unbroken, may be used for purposes other than as a weapon, and the possession of a baseball bat is not in itself the subject of a penal prohibition, the use to which the baseball bat was important.”
Whew — glad that they cleared that up, or the whole softball team would be in trouble.
But this part of the Code now includes at least dozens of separate categories of weapons, including quite a few, um . . . special kinds of guns. These include sawed-off shotguns, cane guns, wallet guns and, as we started out with, zip guns. (Which, by the way, are a host of crude, home-manufactured guns — often capable of firing only one bullet at a time).
There's also a prohibition on “a camouflaging firearm container,” which is defined as something that conceals a gun and allows it to be fired, but doesn't look like a gun. Picture, say, a sandwich . . . with a trigger. And in line with that are three truly curious items — an “unconventional pistol,” an “undetectable firearm,” or a firearm “not immediately recognizable as a firearm.”
So — if it's an “undetectable firearm” or a firearm “not immediately recognizable as a firearm,” how is a police officer supposed to know what it is, to make an arrest?
Besides billys and blackjacks, these laws also prohibit a number of other clubs, including leaded canes, “saps,” and a whole boatload of concealed knives: ballistic knives, belt buckle knives, air gauge knives, cane swords (which one might have thought went out with Errol Flynn), writing pen knives, and my personal favorite, the lipstick case knife — which is just what it sounds like. If a woman carries one of those, she's well-advised not to touch up her makeup in a dark room.
There are also many statutes devoted to instruments used in martial arts, including “nunchakus,” “shobi-zues,” and “shurikens.” Unlike a billy or a dirk, the statute helpfully includes detailed descriptions of these — as, for example, that a “shuriken” is “any instrument, without handles, consisting of a metal plate having three or more radiating points with one or more sharp edges and designed in the shape of a polygon, trefoil, cross, star, diamond, or other geometric shape for use as a weapon for throwing.”
Left unstated, of course, is that even though it's illegal to carry a billy, a slingshot, a leaded cane, a shobi-zue, a dirk, or a dagger, it's perfectly okay to possess a handgun . . . as long as it's a regular, everyday handgun to kill people.
And, of course, as long as it looks like a gun.