A while back, I was a guest on Eye on the Target with my friend, Amanda Suffecool. During that show, a member of the audience asked if I believed the Second Amendment only applied to guns. My answer was that no, it didn’t. The Second Amendment applies to “arms,” which included a lot of other things at the time, including things like swords and knives.
We just focus mostly on guns because that’s both the most effective means for self-defense and the target of more regulation than other things that might be considered arms.
But there’s still a lot of knife control out there.
However, thanks to the Bruen decision, there’s one less such law.
Residents of Massachusetts are now free to arm themselves with switchblades after a 67-year-old restriction was struck down following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 landmark decision on gun rights and the Second Amendment.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision on Tuesday applied new guidance from the Bruen decision, which declared that citizens have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense. The Supreme Judicial Court concluded that switchblades aren’t deserving of special restrictions under the Second Amendment.
“Nothing about the physical qualities of switchblades suggests they are uniquely dangerous,” Justice Serge Georges Jr. wrote.
…
In its decision, the Supreme Judicial Court reviewed this history of knives and pocket knives from colonial times in following U.S. Supreme Court guidance to focus on whether weapon restrictions are consistent with this nation’s “historical tradition” of arms regulation.
Georges concluded that the broad category including spring-loaded knifes are “arms” under the Second Amendment. “Therefore, the carrying of switchblades is presumptively protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment,” he wrote.
The state attorney general criticized the ruling, because of course she did.
However, in this case, the ruling is absolutely correct. Knives do fall under the category of arms and are protected by the Second Amendment and under the Bruen decision, a state seeking to uphold restrictions on any kind of knife need to show an analog from the time of the nation’s founding.
Massachusetts failed to do that.
What’s more, they can’t do that. They can’t because there’s nothing remotely from the period that would suggest the Founding Fathers would have considered a ban on certain kinds of knives.
Especially since knives are tools. Sure, guns are tools as well, but knives serve a lot of non-violent purposes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself needing a knife just going about my day-to-day life. Luckily, I almost always have one–and if I don’t, it’s because I’m going somewhere that prohibits them, which is a problem as well.
Yet all of those issues are mundane. They’re things like cutting string or opening a box. Sometimes, they need a one-handed opening, which is where automatic knives come in really handy.
So in many ways, prohibitions on any kind of knife is even dumber than gun control. A gun allows me to defend myself, but most people will never have that need. We don’t know who will or won’t, which is why gun prohibitions of any kind are morally wrong.
Everyone needs a knife at some point or another, and one that flips out with the push of a button is no different than one I can flick out with my thumb.
And even if they didn’t, the Second Amendment is still a thing, so officials in Massachusetts needs to get bent.
