Friend Rockstar sends me This Story.
There are tons of stories, books, and web pages devoted to stupid laws that are still on the books.
Arkansas
It’s illegal to mispronounce the name of the state of Arkansas.Delaware
It’s illegal to get married on a dare.Florida
If you tie an elephant to a parking meter, you must pay the same parking fee as you would for a vehicle.
Funny shit, right? Yeah its amusing to read them.
Still once you think about it, it can get pretty scary. I mean I can be having a fish sandwich in Little Rock and utter the syllables, “Arrr-Can-Zass” and technically I can be charged with a crime. If I laugh it off like the joke it is, I CAN be charged with resisting arrest, and maybe even get force used against me.
Now the police may not enforce such a law….but just because they aren’t now, doesn’t mean they won’t some other time.
The bottom line we have too many laws on our books that nobody can be truly sure they are 100% in compliance with the law, and judicial precedence makes it even more foggy, given that a odd judicial call can mean a law that 90% of literate people will read as x, is enforced as y.
And our elected representatives get referred to as “Lawmakers” so they feel they need to do just that, rather than spend some of their time culling the festering heard of useless laws that COULD be used to put innocent people behind bars or subject to fines.
Funny at first…but not so funny when you look too far in….
I live in AR and have never heard of this law.
Trust me, Florida has even dumber laws. Trust me. If you’ve ever been in FL on spring break and done *ANYTHING* fun, you’re a criminal.
Three felonies a day, baby!
Yup. Reading list suggestion.
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594032556
Drag the BATFE into your life and it can become 10 a day, depending on how they like you that particular day, even if you’re an inanimate object like Len’s upper that got “arrested” by Federal Marshalls.
US v. One Historic Arms Model 54RCCS “7.62X54R Caliber Conversion System
for example
They tried to get him to re-file paperwork on it as a MG which would have been a felony, he refused, so they arrested the inanimate object. Oddly, they initially sent the Marshalls to the wrong cop shop, so we are still wondering if his inanimate object that was in the hands of LEOs might also be charged with “evading arrest”.
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Weer’d, I think we have to find ourselves a gorilla. Civil disobedience, yo!
I really have to wonder how the elephant law came to pass…
I don’t think that list was well vetted, IIRC the Indiana one was actually a definition for the area of a circle and was never passed into law, but eh whatever the point still stands I can think of at least a few Texas laws that are just ridiculous.