It's a Crime to Call Someone a Coward for Refusing a Duel

In the dueling era, refusing a challenge carried a social price: your rival could "post" you — publish a public notice branding you a coward — and the shame often forced men into fights they'd tried to avoid. Anti-dueling reformers understood that to kill the duel, you had to kill the posting. So Nevada's 1911 Crimes and Punishments Act criminalized the insult itself.

NRS 200.440, "Posting for not fighting," survives verbatim in spirit: "If any person posts another, or in writing, print or orally uses any reproachable or contemptuous language to or concerning another, for not fighting a duel, or for not sending or accepting a challenge, the person is guilty of a gross misdemeanor." Read it carefully — the crime isn't fighting. It's mocking someone for not fighting. Nevada made peer pressure a jailable offense, a full century before anyone coined the term "toxic masculinity."

The statute sits inside a complete anti-dueling code: NRS 200.410 treats a death resulting from a duel as murder, NRS 200.430 governs witness testimony in duel prosecutions, and NRS 200.450 — the one still charged today — criminalizes the challenge itself. Nobody has been prosecuted for posting a coward in living memory, but the Legislature has never repealed it. Somewhere in the Nevada Revised Statutes, it is still technically a crime to taunt a man for declining pistols at dawn.