Slight correction Stranger… A few years ago, the California legislature broke up section 12020 and put most of the illegal weapons in their own individual sections. Carrying a concealed dirk or dagger, as an example, moved from section 12020(a)(4) to section 21310. A more up to date link:
I was thinking of Massachusetts, but apparently it’s not as clear-cut as I thought. There are circumstances where it is a felony to posses them, though.
The pepper spray is more straight forward, it’s treated as a firearm and you can possess it if you have a firearms ID card - not easy to get, but not impossible for most people (it helps to be white and heterosexual, since it’s entirely at the discretion of the local police).
The bottom line is that in America, EVERYTHING is illegal. There’s a general “not hurting or costing anyone money” principle of discretion (obviously not with respect to drug laws). But every one of you have committed at least 100 felonies since you woke up this morning. Making something dangerous is always going to be illegal. I doubt it’s even possible to cook a meal without technically risking life in prison.
No - Pepper spray in Massachusetts only requires a limited FID card, which is a “shall issue” license - if you meet the age, no convictions, and no mental illness history requirements, they HAVE to give you an FID. A non-limited FID, which is good for non-semi-auto long guns, is also “shall issue”, but has a training requirement as well. Limited license gets free renewals too, while a non-limited is $100 every 6 years. An LTC, which is needed for handguns and semi-auto long guns, is the one that’s discretionary. Cite.
The Feds almost tried to enforce this one, but backed down before it could face judicial review. The case is United States of America v. Progressive, Inc., in which The Progressive, a paper which, put it this way, wasn’t exactly conservative, wanted to publish information about the hydrogen bomb (the Teller-Ulam design). The DOE (Department Of Energy) took them to court and, before the “born secret” doctrine could be tested, the government dropped the case.
The government claimed they dropped it because other newspapers published the same information, so the case was moot. Non-governmental smartasses claim that the government realized that “born secret” could well have been “born dead” and a judge would so rule, and didn’t want to take the chance.
No other case has been brought on that basis. Therefore, due to the [del]Copenhagen interpretation[/del] nature of legality in a common law system, we don’t really know whether “born secret” is valid law. It’s in a strange legal limbo, where it can be used as threat by people who’d never seriously contemplate actually bringing it out in a real conflict. That’s utterly unlike anything else we’re talking about, hein?
Tesla’s house and laboratory were raided by the Feds shortly after his death, to snatch up all of his research on death rays. It’s not clear what the legal basis for this was, beyond, “WWII, Nazis, shaddup.”
Interestingly, even though it’s his Death Ray that almost certainly started the meme, he proposed it in the mid-1930s.
