Editor’s Note: Since I started providing legal advice to AKTI, I have loosened my no politics rule a bit to provide insights and commentary on legal issues related to knives. This is one of those articles. As with everything I write both for AKTI and here, this is all my opinion. It is not legal advice, which requires knowledge of specific facts. If you need a lawyer for a criminal case involving knives, contact the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers here for a listing of lawyers in your state. If you want a more technical assessment of this issue, see AKTI’s site here.

Regardless of how you feel about the election, if your reading this site there is at least one good thing to come from it—we have a real chance at repealing the Federal Switchblade Act (FSA). With the more 2A-friendly party controlling the White House, both chambers of Congress, and the Supreme Court (and yes, I consider them a purely political institution at this point), there has never been a better time to take down this unnecessary law.

But it is not just an alignment of political forces in the federal government that make now the time to move. Slowly but surely state after state has passed laws legalizing automatic knives. We are down to a handful of states—Washington, New Mexico, Vermont, Delaware, and Minnesota—that still have functional bans on the books. But state legalization took a stunning turn in 2024 thanks to Bruen. One state, my home state of Massachusetts, just legalized automatics, not through legislative action, but instead through caselaw. In Commonwealth v. Canjura, the Supreme Judicial Court held that Massachusetts’ auto knife ban violated the Second Amendment post-Bruen. Canjura, hopefully, shows a path for litigants in non-auto states.

We are poised on the edge of the end of the FSA. Let me walk you through why we should end this silly law, aside from the facts that automatic knives are cool.

False Narrative Origin Story

Who can forget the iconic Rita Moreno in West Side Story? Moreno is an American treasure with a career that spans 70 years (including the Fast and the Furious series, because, eventually, everyone will have been in a Fast movie). It was a modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in mid-1950s New York. Debuting in 1957, the play depicts two gangs—one white and one Puerto Rican—settling scores with bladed combat. The knife of choice was the switchblade. This play traded on urban legends about the lethality and common use of automatic knives. People in the 1950s genuinely thought autos were the source of problems in inner city America. Obviously, it was automatic knives causing problems, not racism, sexism, undiagnosed drug addiction, alcohol abuse, a crisis in the mental healthcare system, collusion in local politics, McCarthy witch hunts on the federal level, nuclear proliferation, homophobia, no limitation on drinking and driving, no mandatory helmet or seatbelt laws, poor neonatal care, and wanton environmental destruction. It wasn’t any of that. It was knives that opened with a button that caused all of the problems.

It is no coincidence that the FSA was passed in 1958, at the height of the auto knife moral panic. Notably the Voting Rights Act passed later, in 1964, showing you what was higher on people’s list of political priorities. But there was no data to back up this idea that there was a link between criminality and automatic knives. Even today there is no link. In fact, since the state legalization movement began a decade ago crime rates, including violent crime rates, have gone down (except for the COVID blip seen everywhere).

The FSA was the concretization of a fear of outsiders and newcomers. It was the manifestation of more than bit of racism. And it has no actual protective features. It was, like all laws passed in response to a moral panic or mass hysteria, a feel good solution to a problem that required something else entirely.

Design Workarounds

The FSA is stupid for another reason—its justification no longer makes sense. Originally, people were afraid of autos because they could deploy quickly AND they concealed easily. Nowadays, well-tuned knives with good strong detents can open just as fast an auto. Assisted opening knives are also just as fast. And finally, the absolutely brilliant Emerson wave makes some knives FASTER than autos as they are extracted from a pocket and deploy simultaneously. If autos were targeted because they opened too fast and made it easy to conceal a deadly weapon, modern designs and machining tolerances render this argument completely moot. The FSA, from a design standpoint, is like banning carbon fiber horseshoes in an age of cars. It is stupendously dumb and one of the hallmarks of governmental decisionmaking. The FSA is fighting the last war, ignorant of the fact that knife designs have moved on, from a speed perspective.

Incredibly Broad Scope

The FSA doesn’t ban the possession of automatic knives. You can have all the switchblades you want under federal law. But it does ban introducing them into “interstate commerce.” This phrase means something different from what people think it means. Interstate commerce is a legal term of art that ties into Congress’s constitutional authority to pass laws. They can regulate commerce but only if it occurs between the states. This power is broadly interpretered. You can be charged with causing something to be shipped interstate commerce even if you don’t know that it did. The Government can demonstrate an “interstate commerce nexus” by showing that the item in question passed through interstate commerce, that is traveled between states as part of a business transaction, at some point it is existence. These two ideas mean that the FSA has a very broad net.

In fact, it is probably easier to define what isn’t interstate commerce. If you buy an automatic in your home state, where it is legal, for sake of argument, and then return to your home having never traveled outside of the state on the way home, you are fine. Otherwise, there is an argument that the transaction, which you caused, constitutes interstate commerce. And that, unfortunately, gets you inside the reach of the FSA. Shipping from another state via an Internet transaction almost certain counts. And that’s the rub. Most knife commerce these days is online and that means that the FSA reaches a much broader swath of people now than it did when the FSA was passed. But the law was passed when the Internet didn’t exist so this incredibly broad scope was clearly not envisioned by those drafting the legislation. For this reason alone, the law is an exercise in legislative folly.

Exceptions That Don’t Actually Exist

People often think that the FSA has an exception for active law enforcement. And this not just keyboard warriors on knife forums. Lots and lots of people think that the FSA allows police to carry automatic knives. In fact, many websites that sell them require law enforcement verification prior to shipping. Unfortunately, this is a myth. There is no exception for active-duty law enforcement. The closest the law gets is an exception for active-duty military. But if you are a police officer, you have no special rights when it comes to the FSA. It is just as illegal for you to cause an automatic to be shipped through interstate commerce as it is anyone else. Section 1244 of the law lays out the four exceptions: 1) common carriers (shipping companies); 2) shipping as part of a contract for the Armed Forces; 3) "the Armed Forces or any member or employee thereof acting in the performance of his duty"; 4) people with one arm; and 5) assisted knives.

EMTs? No.

Fire? No.

Police? No.

Private Security? No.

None of these have an exception to the FSA despite the common wisdom being that they do. The law does not work the way people think it does because, again, it is a stupid piece of legislation.

No Case Law Guidance

Federal statutes are written by Congress. They try to be specific but they can’t account for every scenario. As a result, case law usually puts flesh on the bone. Look up the wire tap statute and you will find thousands of cases that guide lawyers and citizens through every single nuance in the statute’s language. The same is true with virtually every criminal statute in the federal code.

But the FSA, which has prison time as a penalty and thus counts as a criminal statute, has only a handful of cases that help explain the statute. And of those only one—US v. Nelson—tells us how the law applies to individuals. The recent case, Knife Rights v. Garland, only deepened the mystery of what, exactly, the FSA means. There the Court refused to strike down the law pursuant to Bruen, as the plaintiffs asked. In fact, they didn’t even reach the merits of the case. But the court DID say that the law, while rarely applied, is still being applied to individuals. If you read the Government’s brief you will see that there are handful or so FSA cases around the country. But none of them are identified. So we don’t know what is going on in those cases.

What’s worse, we probably never will figure out what happened. Since the advent of the US Sentencing Guidelines, which penalize defendant’s going to trial (or, as they claim, reward people for taking pleas), very, very few cases go to trial or even are contested. Without contested charges, there are no reported opinions and without reported opinions, there is no case law to guide us about how the FSA works. Coincidentally, Nelson, which applied the FSA to an individual, was decided the year before the US Sentencing Guidelines were rolled out. That means, unfortunately, it was probably both the first and last of its kind.

Garland made clear that challenges to the FSA in civil court are unlikely to be successful for standing reasons and the US Sentencing Guidelines make it very unlikely we will get a criminal case that will provide guidance. As a result, we are locked in a situation in which new case law interpreting the FSA is almost impossible to get. For lawyers, police, prosecutors, and citizens its a terrible scenario—a broad law with very little shape to it.

With a Republican trifecta in the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate, let’s bring down this beast once and for all.