Switchblade knives have long been associated with gangs of the '50s and 60s. It's the stuff of the Sharks and the Jets, not the Bloods and the Crips, but that doesn't mean that people didn't try to ban them. In fact, they were successful.
Unfortunately for them, even if the wrong people like to use something like a switchblade for nefarious purposes even to this day, it doesn't change the fact that they qualify as arms under the Second Amendment.
And that's pretty much what the Fifth Circuit figured, too.
A US law that bans the manufacturing of switchblades for sale or distribution across state lines violates the right to keep and bear arms under the US Constitution's Second Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled.The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in a ruling late on Wednesday said a landmark 2022 US Supreme Court decision requiring modern gun restrictions to be consistent with the nation's history and tradition of arms regulation also applied to bladed weapons covered by the Federal Switchblade Act.US Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote in the decision that Congress adopted that law in 1958 during a period of "hysteria" surrounding juvenile delinquency, with the goal of keeping such spring-release pocketknives out of the reach of teenagers. But Elrod said the ban was inconsistent with how the nation at its founding in the 18th century had regulated the use of such weapons."Knives have been used for defense throughout human history, including the American founding," Elrod wrote.Elrod said switchblades were no exception. Elrod said the US Justice Department, in defending the law in the case, had failed to point to any historical statute similar to the federal ban on switchblades, weapons that she said constitute "arms" that people have a right under the Second Amendment to possess for self-defense.
It remains to be seen what the Department of Justice will do here. On one hand, it's been pretty pro-gun lately, with not just the civil rights lawsuits against various state or local governments, but they defended this law, arguing that it was consistent with the history of regulating "dangerous and unusual" weapons. The thing is, they're not particularly dangerous, nor are they that unusual.
Automatic knives are a thing that are pretty common today. Just a push of the button and the blade flicks out. They're not switchblades, apparently, but they operate just like them, and guess what? There's absolutely nothing going on with them.
Plus, as Judge Elrod noted, there's no real history there for regulating such a thing. I'm sure someone will invoke the Bowie knife statutes, and they're a better parallel here than with modern sporting rifles, but that doesn't mean it's quite the same thing, either.
Hopefully, the DOJ will just let this one lie. Failing that, may it move up the judicial chain until it's formally struck down by the Supreme Court. [Editor's note - the Ninth Circuit has upheld the federal ban on switchblades, and the plaintiffs in that case will soon be filing a cert petition with the Supreme Court, so even if DOJ doesn't appeal the Fifth Circuit's decision the High Court will have an opportunity to address the circuit court split that now exists. - Cam]
This is a Second Amendment issue, and it's an important one because the right to keep and bear arms should not and cannot be twisted to only mean guns as we currently understand them. While these are kind of the pinnacle of civilian arms, the reality is that we don't know what the future will hold, and the sooner we can make it clear that we're not going to accept restrictions on any arms, the less likely it is we'll be playing catchup later on.
To see more on this, Cam covered it on Thursday's Cam & Company.