Fighting Sticks of Death
Whether they’re nunchuks, numchucks, ninja chucks, or nunchakus, there is no doubt that these sticks linked by a bit of string or chain are the most deadly sticks linked by a bit of string or chain in the world! No two sticks have ever been the source of so much heavy breathing and moralizing. Even Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor HATES them!
Bruce Lee made nunchuks sexy in Enter the Dragon but right after the movie came out Newsweek published an article called “Killer Sticks” (October, 15, 1973) about how an expert could use nunchuks to “bash or strangle his victim” and claimed they were used to attack the police in Baltimore. The very next day, the Philadelphia Police Commissioner ordered that anyone found with nunchuks would be arrested. In California, the same Newsweek article got cited when a bill was introduced for a nunchuk ban, and New York state banned them the same year (that law wasn’t overturned until 2018). But despite the claim that they were used by gang members, few if any police officers said they had actually witnessed nunchuk attacks and Newsweek never revealed the author of the scare piece. Nevertheless, the fear persisted with newspaper articles citing them being “twirled” ominously in the “dingy headquarters” of Lyndon LaRouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees, a student group which reportedly kidnapped and tortured its own members and planned to overthrow the government of the United States.
So the dichotomy persisted. Martial arts magazines offered nunchuks and all kinds of fun weapons for sale, while at the same time it was completely illegal to own them in certain states. In New York City, you could only carry them down the street if you were on the way to surrender them at your local precinct house (and then only after giving them 24 hour written notice that you intended to do so) and in California you could own a shotgun or a .45 but owning nunchuks or a shuriken was a felony offense that came with a 5 year sentence.
The laws led to arrests (even if the nunchuks were covered in foam) even though the weapons were only a menace in movies. As one 15-year veteran of the LAPD’s gang unit said, “Gang members, and a lot of other young people, carry the nunchaku a lot, but I personally have never heard of an incident of violence using them. Gangs don’t really have the kind of big hand-to-hand confrontations you see in the movies. The most common gang weapon is the sawed-off shotgun.”