Hey, Jason Toon here. I’ve never really been the weapon-carrying type, under the sound assumption that I’d be more likely to hurt myself with it than any attacker. In this Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture, we look at one such device whose literal blowback could be worse for the shooter than the target. When firearms started to be regulated in the United States, after years of rising murder rates during Prohibition, some enterprising types probed the limits of the definition of “firearm”. What if a weapon didn’t shoot live ammunition, but canisters of gas?
Those, it turned out, were perfectly legal and remained unregulated, at least at the federal level. The little ads in the back of men’s magazines soon sprouted with a new essential for any self-respecting urban soldier of fortune: the tear gas pen. It was everything it sounded like, and less. Vicious dogs and morons, bewareCould this little pen really offer “protection for everybody against robbers, criminals, morons, vicious dogs, etc.”, as one ad put it? The folks at Personal Defense World did some digging into how they worked. Essentially, it’s a little gun with the firing mechanism built into the barrel. Load it with a cartridge (the one they looked at carried 1.5g of the active ingredient in Mace), point, and fire away. “Firing is a WIPING motion of the thumb on the trigger screw - not a push,” warn the instructions for the Penguin Industries tear gas pen. Oh, there were a few other little things to watch out for. If you fire it indoors, get out of the building for at least 15 minutes. If you fire it at a range of three feet or less, the blast itself could cause injury. “Keep out of the hands of children and irresponsible persons,” Penguin Industries advises, although there’s nobody stopping an irresponsible adult from buying it in the first place. But qualms aside, “when handled with respect it can save your life.” Maybe. But the launch of tear gas pens in the late 1920s was followed by a contrail of newspaper stories about people accidentally gassing themselves or bystanders. “I didn’t know it was loaded,” said Chief City Magistrate Joseph E. Corrigan of Portland, Oregon in 1930, after discharging a tear gas pen accidentally in his pocket in the mayor’s office. “The eye-smarting gas gushed out and filled the room and the halls,” reported the Portland Press-Herald.
That same year, Isadore Zeplowitz, owner of a clothing store in Hammond, Indiana, tried to thwart a thief with his tear gas pen, only to be engulfed and incapacitated himself. “When he regained his eyesight, he found the robber had left with $75 and the Zeplowitz watch,” reported the Associated Press. Elsewhere, a Philadelphia dietician was hospitalized after she dropped her tear gas pen in a hotel lobby and it fired. It seemed police were particularly at risk of inadvertent gassing. A police sergeant in Salt Lake City was temporarily blinded by the accidental discharge of a tear gas pen taken off of a suspect, while a New Jersey sheriff and his assistant suffered the same when the aide dropped a tear gas pen in the police station’s seized liquor vault. (Hmm, wonder what they were up to in there…?) Most comically, a tear gas pen salesman demonstrating his wares cleared a sheriff’s office in Oroville, California. “That just shows what one of our little fountain pen gas throwers will do,” the unnamed salesman gamely told the local paper. History does not record if he made the sale. “Not terribly intimidating”With all that accidental mayhem to its credit, the tear gas pen must have been even more devastating when used intentionally, right? Well, stories about the effective use of them are much more thin on the ground. In Compton, California, in 1931, one C.S. Smith used a tear gas pen to subdue a man named Fred O. Rossman who fired three shots at him from a revolver. But the complexion of the story changes somewhat when you discover that both men were cops themselves: Deputy Smith was trying to arrest Deputy Rossman for drunk driving. But that spotty record, and the Oroville farce, didn’t stop law enforcement agencies from ordering them for their officers. During the early 1930s, police departments from California to Oklahoma to Minnesota to Ohio armed themselves with these nonlethal gadgets. Were they effective? I’ll leave that to the expert at Personal Defense World. As much as he values stopping power in a handheld device, he’s skeptical: “I’m not so sure 1.5 grams of [Mace] fired out of a pen gun in an open space is going to be terribly intimidating.”
Meanwhile, federal indifference aside, the law was closing in. Several states and cities moved to specifically ban tear gas pens without a gun license. “Tear gas fountain pens may be novel playthings, but their sale or possession is unlawful in the City of Los Angeles,” reported the Los Angeles Evening Citizen-News in 1931 about a recently passed ordinance. The makers of tear gas guns mounted a counter-campaign to keep their products on the market, with success in some jurisdictions. After that initial wave of action and reaction, tear gas pens hovered in a legal twilight, advertised on the grimy back pages of men’s magazines, sold at gun stores and truck stops, passed around through the teenage contraband network. They still made headlines, mostly for going off accidentally in public places, or for low-level hoodlums being arrested with them. A 1963 piece by syndicated columnist George Dixon even said more and more Congressional representatives, staff, and families were carrying tear gas pens as the DC crime rate rose. It all came to an end in 1975. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms reclassified tear gas pens into the same legal status as any other firearm. As the loosening of gun laws began in the 1980s and accelerated to today, the tear gas pen was redundant: if you’re going to carry a weapon, why bother with one of questionable effectiveness whose “ammo” goes wherever the wind blows it? Its undeniable Bondian charisma aside, the tear gas pen is no more. But like ninja stars and M-80s, tear gas pens will live on in the arsenal of schoolyard legend: weapons that seem more powerful than they are, to little boys who haven’t grown into their own power yet.
I don’t think I want a tear gas pen, but it does make me think of all the silly novelty pens I’ve seen through the years. I mean, of course, the ‘flip the pen upside down and everyone’s clothes float off’, but after you’re 13 or so, that has less appeal. I loved those “6 colors in one” pens. I remain obsessed with space pens, where I can write upside down or under water or in space, all circumstances I continue to wait for. How about you, got any favorite pen, especially if it’s got any special features? Let’s talk about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat. —Dave (and the rest of Meh) Rest assured that you can fire these previous Shoddy Goods stories indoors or outdoors, without risk of blindness or suffocation: And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!
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