10 Legal Problems Superheroes Don't Like To Talk About

Wolverine carries around six - for want of a better word - giant knives, attached to his skeleton. Cable never goes anywhere without highly advanced, often unfeasibly large firearms. Captain Atom is a weapon of mass destruction, as are Havok, Firestorm, Scarlet Witch and Superman… to name only a few.

Of course, to consider whether the law might apply here is largely irrelevant if no authority in the country will consider pressing charges, and in order for them to do that, they have to determine that there may have been an offence and then determine how best to act upon it.

Let’s not forget that in real life the siege at Waco in 1993, culminating in the deaths of over eighty people (including women and children), came about because the federal government were moving in to investigate weapons violations, including the unlicensed ownership and sale of grenades and fully automatic weapons.

Now imagine the outcome if the ATF (or S.H.I.E.L.D., whatever) were to lay siege to the Jean Grey School For Higher Learning in Westchester. Despite his many claims to divinity, David Koresh didn’t actually have superpowers.

Hypothetically speaking, Tony Stark - a public figure - flies a weapon he’s almost certainly not licensed for. With Extremis and other personal modifications occurring on an ad hoc basis, any such licence - even if it was granted in the first place - would need reinvestigating and updating on a weekly basis just to stay current, and he’d need to be periodically medically checked to ensure that his tech and its power supply isn’t a threat to himself or others.

Green Lantern is one of many heroes who derives their power from a powerful object acquired elsewhere - in his case, from aliens. Vixen received her Tantu totem down the family line, but originally from an African god. Are these mysterious foreign items of great power legal for private citizens to bring into the US and own? Do they have potential environmental side effects that need investigation?

Perhaps it’s not the ownership of powers, but their use that’s questionable. Psi powers that allow mind reading or mental influence would be violating any number of statutes through their use, although first there would need to be evidence that they had been used.

And then there’s sorcerers like Doctor Strange. It can easily be argued that Strange’s wielding of occult energies and regular communion with spectral, demonic and divine entities on this plane of existence are as bad for the environment and for the general public as the unlicensed use of a nuclear facility.