The Bay State prohibition of the legendary weapon dates back to fears from 50 years ago about menacing young kung fu hooligans. Can the nunchuck ban be reversed?
Massachusetts remains the only state in the country in which it is illegal to possess nunchucks. The iconic martial arts tool of two wood or metal bars connected with a rope or chain was banned in the state in 1975 amid suburban phobias of kung fu fighting street gangs.
Much like the box office success of Bruce Lee or the 1990s cartoon dominance of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, those fears have long since faded, but the statewide prohibition remains. With a legislature that has trouble effectively tending to critical issues like housing, court action may be the only way to legitimize the martial arts weapon in the Bay State.
Nunchucks are also known by a variety of different names, including nunchaku, clackers, zeebows, or simply kung fu sticks. Regardless of the terminology, holding a pair constitutes possession of a deadly weapon in Mass, which could potentially net a careless cosplayer up to five years in state prison.
Nunchucks on trial and a Massachusetts switchblade ruling
Until a few years ago, this was one of four states with a nunchuck ban. That changed when the US Supreme Court struck down New York’s ban in 2019. California and Arizona repealed their own bans shortly after, leaving Massachusetts as the last state left where Michelangelo would not be welcome.
The nunchuck ban was invoked during a recent case, Commonwealth v. Canjura, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the state’s ban on switchblades violated the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution.
The legal challenge came when police arrested David Canjura in Boston in 2020, after a fight with his girlfriend. The officers found a switchblade tucked into his waistband and charged him with carrying a deadly weapon in addition to assault and battery.
“The defendant argues a switchblade, at root, is a type of folding pocketknife, and law-abiding citizens have possessed folding pocketknives for lawful purposes since our nation’s founding, including for self-defense. Therefore, notwithstanding its spring-loaded opening mechanism, a switchblade is an ‘arm’ under the Second,” Associate Justice Serge Georges wrote in the Aug. 27, 2024 opinion. “The Commonwealth contends knives categorically are not protected by the Second Amendment because the definition of arms is limited to firearms. The Commonwealth is incorrect—as discussed above, the Second Amendment extends to all bearable arms and is not limited to firearms.”
Prior to the ruling, eagle-eyed docket watchers may have spotted an amicus brief in the case from River Valley Taekwondo, filed by attorney and taekwondo practitioner Luke Ryan.
An amicus brief, or “friend of the court’ brief, is basically a court filing from a third party who is not directly involved in the case, but could potentially be impacted by the ruling. In this case, it was from a martial arts school that hoped a ruling that switchblades were protected by the 2nd Amendment might lead to a similar assessment on martial arts weapons.
“I was hopeful that the court would at least signal something and say maybe it’s time that we do a little bit more comprehensive review of what’s there as opposed to waiting for a case,” Ryan said in an interview. The SJC’s opinion acknowledged the amicus brief in a footnote without addressing nunchucks any further.
“It just seems like a blue law almost that just exists because people can’t be bothered to change it,” Ryan added, “but the whole statute contains stuff in it that is basically a reflection of the prejudices of the day.”
How nunchucks first got banned in Massachusetts and beyond
State laws banning nunchucks and other martial arts weapons sprang up in the 1970s in the wake of a martial arts craze that brought flying kicks and karate chops to the big screen alongside a rampant fear of marauding Asian street gangs armed with nunchucks, katana swords, and razor-sharp throwing stars also known as shurikens.
The kung fu movie craze in the United States started with the 1973 release of “Five Fingers of Death.” Initially the movies were panned by critics, but their financial success was unquestionable.
“If one month ago anyone had suggested that a wave of Chinese films made in Hong Kong would outdraw the regulation films he would have been put down a psychotic,” film critic George McKinnon wrote in the May 4, 1973 edition of the Boston Globe. “But in recent weeks three Hong Kong films have smashed box office records in Boston.”
McKinnon was reviewing “The Road to Hong Kong,” which was the latest in a line of kung fu movies whose financial success baffled him.
“Already in town at the Savoy is ‘Fists of Fury’ which in its opening day did more business than most films do in a week. Then Just before that was ‘Five Fingers of Death,’ which was a dreadful movie but did great business,” McKinnon wrote. “What the success of these Hong Kong films is due to is difficult to determine.”
Incidentally, kung fu movie icon Bruce Lee introduced his nunchuck prowess to American audiences in “Fists of Fury.”
With the success of martial arts movies, parents and police began worrying about what impacts these films would have on children that in the same breath were easily influenced, but also unruly and violent.
Two years later, the Massachusetts legislature passed a ban on nunchucks and shurikens in 1975.
Capt. William Hogan, commander of the Boston Police Academy, heralded the passage of the state’s ban in the Sept. 8 1975 issue of the Globe, during which Hogan claimed that nunchucks and shurikens were “commonly used in street crime.”
“We also had a lot of these weapons picked up by metal scanners at Boston schools last year,” Hogan added.
The time Ted Kennedy took a swing against nunchucks
A full decade after Hogan’s stand, the nunchuck panic was still palpable and Sen. Ted Kennedy took Massachusetts’ legislative action national, vowing to seek a federal ban on mail-order kung fu weapons while speaking at a police graduation ceremony in Malden, Massachusetts on the Friday before Apr. 23, 1985, according to that date’s edition of the Washington Times.
Kennedy would present that bill to the Senate a few months later, according to the record of the 99th Congress.
“Razor- sharp throwing stars, kung fu killing sticks, known as nunchakus, and fighting chains, which are all designed to maim or kill other human beings and which are often available for as little as $10 or less, continue to be shipped through the U.S. mail,” Kennedy said when he submitted his bill to ban mail order martial arts weapons.
Included in the congressional record along with the text of the bill was an assortment of pearl-clutching articles spreading fear of the martial arts menace.
Sgt. T. P. Kulig, of the Dunkirk Police Department, told Buffalo, New York’s Morning Union in June, 1985, that he had investigated an incident the previous October in which a 14-year-old boy dressed as a Ninja warrior and carrying nunchucks—also known as chucka sticks—traditionally oak sticks connected with leather or a chain threatened a police officer with a sword.
“Most everybody tries to put it under the rug, but it’s an ongoing problem,” he told the paper. Police said the youth, who was arrested, was part of a group whose members dressed in black and extorted money from other youths.
“The Ninja, an ancient martial arts assassin, is apparently the latest hero for street kids, much as Superman was some years back,” per the June 10, 1985 edition of the Washington Times. The black-hooded Ninja imitators may often be seen practicing karate kicks, but sometimes, thanks to mail-order magazines, they come complete with combat weapons such as nunchakus, throwing stars, and even Samurai swords.”
Larry Kelley, who was identified as a “local karate expert,” told the Boston Globe in March 1985 that he wanted to create a “Ninja Free Amherst” by banning kung fu weapons in the town.
“It’s a cult thing,” he said. “I’ve seen a kid with these nun-chaka in a leather case. He’ll have poor shoes on his feet, but he probably paid $70 for the nun-chaka.”
Kennedy’s bill was bipartisan, with support from future Sec. of State John Kerry and noted racist Sen. Strom Thurmond. Rhode Island Republican Sen. John Chafee also joined as a co-sponsor to Kennedy’s bill with six other senators.
“They have become a new fad with gangs of young boys who use them to terrorize other young people and certainly not to engage in the exercise of martial arts as a sport,” said Chafee.
Ultimately, the bill would fail to get a vote on the legislature’s floor before the end of the session. After that, prohibitions were left to the states.
Nunchucks and the Supreme Court of the United States
Fifteen years later, four states still maintained legal bans on nunchucks: Massachusetts, Arizona, California, and New York, which eventually led to legal action.
Nassau County Police raided the New York home of James Maloney on Aug. 24, 2000 based on suspicion that he was in possession of illegal nunchucks. Police waited 29 months without pressing charges before dropping the case entirely.
The charges were dismissed on Jan. 28, 2003 as part of a deal in which Maloney agreed to plead guilty on a single count of disorderly conduct. Three weeks later, he sued the state in the hopes of killing the nunchuck ban.
At the time, New York was one of four states that banned the martial arts weapons, but Maloney argued that New York was the only state that had actually bothered to prosecute anyone under the ban.
“The aforementioned criminal charge for possession of a nunchaku was based solely on allegations of simple possession of said nunchaku in Plaintiff’s home, and was not supported by any allegations that Plaintiff had: (a) used said nunchaku in the commission of a crime; (b) carried the nunchaku in public; or (c) engaged in any other improper or prohibited conduct in connection with said nunchaku except for such simple possession within his home, nor is any such conduct an element of the defined crime,” according to the 8-page complaint.
Maloney initially lost his case in the Eastern US District of New York in 2007, but he appealed and the case made it all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Maloney in 2010, and ordered that the case be remanded back to the district court for further consideration. Basically, the supremes said that the lower court made a mistake when they tossed the case and now they have to try again to get it right.
The case lasted several more years until Maloney finally won in December 2018, when the court struck down New York’s nunchuck ban.
“There is virtually no evidence that nunchakus are associated with, or have been used to engage in, criminal conduct since Section 265.01(1) was amended to include nunchaku over forty years ago,” District Judge Pamela Chen wrote in a 32-page ruling. “Indeed, while concerns about unlawful violence by ‘street gangs’ involving the use of nunchaku evidently motivated the state assembly to pass the nunchaku ban into law, there are no specific examples or crime statistics regarding these alleged ‘street gang’ nunchaku crimes cited in the legislative materials.”
The nunchuck precedent and Massachusetts
With the New York ruling setting a clear precedent against nunchuck bans, legislators in California and Arizona took their decades-old ban off the books, leaving Massachusetts as the sole state in the union with a prohibition on the kung fu staple.
At this point, lifting the nunchuck ban would require action from the legislature or a court case similar to New York’s Maloney case to force a judicial order. Neither of which are likely to happen any time soon, according to attorney Luke Ryan.
There were several attempts to repeal the ban in the state House and Senate from 2010-2020, led by Rep. David Nangle and Sen. Eileen Donoghue, both from Lowell. Like most bills in Massachusetts, neither ever made it out of committee.
Ryan speculated that those bills may have been pushed by a constituent. “There might be a person, literally, who looked at this and said, This is wrong, and the state rep or state senator said, Yeah, on principle, that’s correct. We’ll file something,” he said.
Those attempts ended when Donoghue left the Senate to become city manager of Lowell. Nangle, meanwhile, left office in disgrace when he was arrested for campaign finance fraud. Nangle was sentenced to 15 months in prison for misappropriation of campaign funds for personal expenses.
Nangle reportedly used his ill-gotten funds to pay private golf club dues, trips to casinos, and expensive dinners. There was no evidence that he spent any of the money on nunchucks.
Getting the courts in Massachusetts to change the law is also difficult, because it requires an activist who has been arrested for possessing nunchucks, or can argue that he or she is likely to be arrested for them.
“Essentially it takes a plaintiff who was exposed to the weapon in some other place, relocates to Massachusetts, realizes it’s actually against the law to do what they want to do, and then instead of realizing it’s a law that’s unlikely to be enforced, they decide, All right, I’m gonna go through the hassle and trouble of flagging myself as a potential law violator, and then trust that the courts will do the right thing and eventually recognize the unconstitutionality of the statute,” Ryan said.
Until that happens, nunchucks in Massachusetts will have to remain in the shadows, much like the pop culture portrayals of the ninjas that originally popularized the weapon.
This article is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. If you want to see more reporting like this, make a contribution at givetobinj.org.
