What Article 181⁷ covers
Article 181⁷ of the Administrative Offences Code of Georgia concerns two items — a gas aerosol device and an electroshock device — and five acts connected with them: carrying, acquiring, taking out of Georgia, transporting or conveying, and dispatching. The wording matters here. The article does not prohibit those acts. It attaches liability to breaching the rules that govern them. In other words, the legislator assumes that carrying, acquisition and transport each have a governing rule, and that the offence consists in departing from it. Every case under this article therefore turns on one question above all others: which specific rule was treated as breached. Equally worth noting is what falls outside the article. Manufacture, import and trade in these devices are not its subject; those activities are addressed by separate provisions of the Code. Nor does it extend to sound (acoustic) weapons: the text of Article 181⁷ names only gas aerosol and electroshock devices, which makes the very first thing to check whether the item recorded in the protocol really is one of those two.

