Sure, That Makes Sense

Federal prosecutors in Nebraska attempting to convict a felon for possessing a gun (it's not allowed), had just one problem: the man did not have a firearm.

What attorneys had on their hands was an American double-action revolver that was manufactured between 1880 and 1941.The problem is that federal code states that the weapon is not a firearm unless it was manufactured after 1896. Without a definitive production date, the gun was inadmissible as evidence.

Undeterred by this minor obstacle, they put on their creative thinking hats, doodled ideas on their conference room dry-erase board, voted on their favorite suggestions, and selected the winner: prosecute him for possessing live ammunition. Which worked, natch.

The morose criminal's defense had rested on the entirely plausible claim that some angry pedestrians he narrowly missed running over threw the gun into the back of his car, which was obviously easier for them to do than to shoot him with said not-a-firearm. There being no legal requirement that ammunition be of a certain vintage, the dude now faces 15 years in prison.

ZORG complains that this case demonstrates the problem of criminal laws that are excessively specific. And he raises the point that a functioning revolutionary war-era musket can just as easily kill someone as a modern revolver. (Thought experiment: would the musket's ball and powder be considered ammunition? Also, how exactly would prosecutors convict a dude who kills someone with such a weapon? By proving he "threw" a bunch of tiny pellets, because he couldn't have "shot" them with the not-a-firearm?) My question: does this case not in fact show the larger problem with having multiple laws that can be separately used to prosecute the same crime?