Fifth Circuit Rules Federal Switchblade Ban Unconstitutional

A federal appeals court has struck down the core of the Federal Switchblade Act, ruling late on Wednesday that the 1958 law's ban on making switchblade knives for sale across state lines, and on transporting or distributing them in interstate commerce, violates the Second Amendment.

What the court held

The three judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, decided the case of Knife Rights, Inc. v. Blanche. Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote the opinion, joined by Judges Don Willett and Cory Wilson. All three judges were appointed by Republican presidents.

The panel applied the test the Supreme Court set in its landmark 2022 decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which requires modern weapons laws to fit the nation's history and tradition of arms regulation. Switchblades, the court held, are "arms" under the plain text of the Second Amendment. The opinion quoted the Supreme Court's Heller decision, which described arms as anything a person wears for defence or takes in hand to strike another.

"Knives have been used for defense throughout human history, including the American founding," Elrod wrote. The court traced spring blade knives back hundreds of years, noted that large scale switchblade production in the United States began in the 1880s, and pointed to the record's evidence that millions of automatically opening knives are in the country, lawfully used for everyday work, hunting, fishing, recreation, camping and hiking.

A law born in a 1950s panic

Congress passed the Federal Switchblade Act in 1958. Section 2 of the act, codified at 15 U.S.C. 1242, sets a fine of up to $2,000, imprisonment for up to five years, or both, for anyone who knowingly introduces a switchblade into interstate commerce, makes one for that purpose, or transports or distributes one in commerce.

Elrod wrote that Congress adopted the law during a period of "hysteria" about juvenile delinquency, aiming to keep spring release pocketknives away from teenagers. The first bill to ban the manufacture and sale of switchblades had reached Congress four years earlier, in 1954, as newspapers promoted the image of a crime wave carried out by young delinquents armed with flick knives.

Why the government lost

Once the panel found switchblades covered by the amendment's text, the burden shifted to the Justice Department to show a historical tradition behind the ban. The government argued that founding era and nineteenth century law had long regulated inherently concealable weapons, which it called particularly dangerous.

The court answered that the government's own evidence worked against it. Of nearly two hundred pre 1900 statutes the government collected on daggers, dirks and sword canes, almost all regulated how such weapons were carried. Only two, an 1881 Arkansas law and an 1837 Georgia law, restricted selling them. Regulating the manner of carry, the panel held, is not the same as banning manufacture, transport and distribution, so the federal ban goes further than the tradition the government proved.

What happens next

Knife Rights, five individuals and two firearms retailers brought the challenge in Texas after a trial judge rejected it, and the appeals court reversed that outcome. The ruling governs federal courts in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. It does not by itself rewrite state laws on carrying or possessing automatic knives.

"The Second Amendment protects knives, not just firearms, and that protection extends to commonly possessed automatically opening knives," Knife Rights said in a statement after the ruling.