Thiessen: Pro-nunchucks ruling vindication for Bruce Lee, writer

One day I was riding on the subway going to a friend’s house, quietly holding my nunchucks, when a police officer approached me. “Do you know those are illegal?” he asked. No, I told him, I didn’t. It hadn’t even occurred to me that possessing a pair of foam-covered nunchucks could be against the law. But it turned out that New York state in 1974 had enacted a ban.

The police officer told me to get off with him at the next stop. He pushed me against a wall, handcuffed me, threw me in a squad car and took me to the New York Transit Police station on Columbus Circle, where I was put into a cell and booked on charges of a Class A misdemeanor, “criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree.”

Calling my mother

I used my one call to phone my mother — a doctor who worked treating heroin addicts in the South Bronx. She came down to the station and berated the arresting officer in her thick Polish accent, offering to take him to Central Park and point him to all the drug dealers selling heroin there. Why didn’t he do something about them? She had to spend thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer, who told us that I could face jail time. We went to court, and he cut a deal to have the prosecution deferred. If I did not commit another crime in the next 12 months, the charges would be dropped and my arrest record expunged. I passed the time without incident and never picked up a pair of nunchucks again.

I have often wondered what would have happened to a kid whose mother could not afford a decent lawyer. It was absurd that a teenager could have had his life ruined, and be stuck with a criminal record, simply because he wanted to be like Bruce Lee.

I always knew my arrest was a travesty. Now three decades later, the law under which I was arrested has been declared unconstitutional. Citing the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which applied the Second Amendment to the states, U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen ruled that “the possession and use of nunchaku is protected by the Second Amendment” and that the sections of the New York law banning them are “an unconstitutional restriction on the right to bear arms … and are, therefore, void.”

The suit was filed by a lawyer named James Maloney, who, like me, had been arrested for possessing nunchucks. He has been fighting this fight since his arrest in 2000. Eighteen years later, he and I have been vindicated. Americans have a constitutional right to keep and bear nunchucks. Not just the foam kind, but the real thing.

I have the feeling that, somewhere up there, Bruce Lee is smiling.