I think we all have broken a rule or law at least one time before in our lives. Whether it’s speeding, jaywalking or simply breaking the dress codes in high school. In a country where we have 50 individual states that each get to make their own set of laws and regulations, you could imagine there have been some strange ones made. Maybe some of these laws just had to do with the culture of the time, or perhaps some legislatures were bored one day during work and just wanted to have some fun. Regardless of the reason, these six laws below, with how strange they are, will make you laugh.
You can get up to 25 years in prison for killing or damaging a cactus in Arizona.
In Arizona, they take their cacti very seriously. So seriously that you could get charged the same amount of jail time for killing a cactus as you could for killing a human. Sounds harsh, right? The Saguaro Cactus, which is also the state flower of Arizona, takes more than 100 years to grow to its full size, and people, for many years, have used them for target practice. This law was made to ensure that this plant was protected.
In Connecticut, a pickle isn’t a pickle until it bounces.
Seems strange, right? Sometime in the 1800s, men were selling cucumbers as pickles, fooling people, perhaps because cucumbers after all are cheaper than pickles. Officials after this decided that the one way to test if a pickle is truly a pickle and not a cucumber without cutting it open is if it bounces. So if you want to make sure you aren't getting ripped off at the grocery store, you can test if a pickle is actually a pickle by dripping it and seeing if it bounces.
It is illegal to walk with an ice cream cone in your back pocket on a Sunday.
This is one of those old laws from the 1800s as well, and it's one through many different states. People aren’t exactly sure why this is, in fact, a law, but here is what some believe. In the 1800s some people used to use ice cream cones to lure horses away from their owners and steal them. As a result, this law was put in place to prevent that. Others believe it has something to do with religion, which would make sense since the law in most states is only restricted to Sundays.
While riding in an elevator in New York, one must talk to no one and fold his hands while looking toward the door
This seems like something we all do anyway while riding in an elevator, and why it was officially made a law, nobody really knows. One theory to why this is a law however is that it prevents uncomfortable situations from happening. Think about it, for the entire time you're riding that elevator, you are essentially trapped in a small enclosed space with that person — who knows what could happen in those 15 to 20 seconds.
In California, couches must not be placed outside.
A lot of the laws talked about so far are ones that are from the 1800s, but this one was made just a little over 10 years ago in 2002. The University of California was a huge party school. So much so that it was claimed to be the number one party school in a 2003 publication of the Princeton Review. One tradition many fraternities at the school had was to burn couches after big and exciting events like sports victories. In order to stop this from happening an ordinance was passed making so no couches could be placed outside.
In New York, slippers are not to be worn in a public place past 10 p.m.
For those of us lazy college kids, this one may be a tad more difficult since some of us don’t like getting dressed to go anywhere on campus. Some speculate that this may be a law because someone once must have hurt or killed themselves slipping and falling into something because they were wearing slippers late at night in the dark. Sometimes just one simple tragedy to invoke a new law.
