Is it illegal to sell knives in California? The answer to that question could put general merchandise cataloger Cook Brothers out of business.
On Feb. 26, the district attorney’s offices of Ventura, Napa, and Marin counties in California sued Chicago-based Cook Brothers for “marketing weapons that are illegal to sell and possess in the state of California,” says Greg Brose, senior deputy DA and supervisor for Ventura County’s consumer and environmental protection unit. “A person who possesses these weapons can be charged with a felony and sent to prison, as can a person or company marketing these items.”
It’s unclear yet when the case will go to court or if it could be settled out of court. The suit seeks $5,000 for each hunting and hobby knife Cook Brothers sold for the three years prior to the DA’s discovery of the knife sales in 1999.
According to Cook Brothers president Ken Tickman, who’s named in the suit, the company stopped selling the knives in California when it was first notified by the Ventura County DA’s office in October 2000; it stopped selling the knives nationwide by January 2001. In addition to offering the knives in its core catalog, Cook Brothers had produced a spin-off knife catalog, which last mailed to 250,000 consumers in 1999.
If the suit holds up in court, Tickman says, “they’ll put us out of business. We feel they’re putting a gun to our head — it’s a holdup.”
From complaint to lawsuit
What Tickman refers to as “a holdup” started in 1999 when the Ventura County DA’s office received a complaint from a resident who felt it was “shocking to find a catalog selling deadly weapons that was being mailed to the residence,” Brose says.
Representatives of Brose’s office, as well as of the DA’s offices in Napa and Marin counties, placed orders for the knives from Cook Brothers. “This is about a business that knew it was violating the law,” Brose says. The California business and professions code, section 17-200, referred to as the Unfair Competition Law, aims to prevent businesses from engaging in any unlawful unfair business practice, which includes selling deadly weapons.
Brose says that his office and Cook Brothers had been pursuing an out-of-court settlement, “but they rejected it.” But that settlement, according to Cook Brothers attorney Michael Grace, a partner with Los Angeles-based firm Grace & Grace, was unrealistic.
“We had offered to notify all the purchasers, take all the product back,” Grace says. “But the DA was uninterested in pursuing that line. They just wanted $1 million, a figure not even based on the number of sales, gross revenue, or anything like that.” In addition, he says, the DA was demanding that Cook Brothers fund a major ad campaign in The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal to alert the public of the knives it had sold.
According to Grace, gross revenue from Cook Brothers’ knife sales were no more than $35,000 a year, with a profit of $3,000-$5,000 a year. The cataloger’s total annual sales are $20 million.
Brose won’t detail the final offer that Cook Brothers rejected, leading to the lawsuit. But Tickman says that before the DA’s offices filed the suit, Cook Brothers provided all the knife-transaction data the DAs sought, only to have them question the accuracy of the data.
“So we gave them the same information again, and they said it was still wrong,” Tickman says. “Then they said they wanted five more years’ worth of information, and we gave it to them on Feb. 22, and they said they were looking for at least $500,000 in a settlement. It was then that our lawyer said there was no way we could do that, and then the next thing I knew I was getting calls from the press about a lawsuit that had been filed.”
Don’t mess with California
Other catalogers that sell knives through the mail have learned to avoid California. Radcliff, KY-based survivalist-gear mailer U.S. Cavalry has for years alerted catalog customers that it won’t ship any of the knives it carries to California. It also won’t ship longer “Rambo-like” knives to New York, which prohibits them, says U.S. Cavalry president/CEO Randy Acton.
“We try to be as conscious as we possibly can of restrictions,” Acton says. In addition to state regulations, U.S. Cavalry must keep track of restrictions in foreign countries. For instance, the company can’t ship packaged military food items, knives, night-vision devices, or gas masks to Japan, where it does a fair amount of business, he says.
In U.S. Cavalry’s 29 years in business, Acton says, he believes the company received only one or two complaint letters from customers, but they didn’t result in any legal actions.