Second Amendment Wins Support Knife Rights’ Federal Cases

July 7, 2026
8:51 am

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Knife Rights just dropped a legal triple-header that could finally pry the federal switchblade ban and its state-level clones off the books, and the timing couldn’t be better. By filing Notices of Supplemental Authority in their California, Minnesota, and federal challenges, the group is waving the Supreme Court’s recent Hemani and Wolford decisions plus the Fifth Circuit’s Comeaux ruling like a constitutional “told-you-so.” Those cases reinforce what gun owners have been saying for years: if the plain text of the Second Amendment covers “arms,” it covers the tools people actually carry for self-defense, and that list isn’t limited to firearms. Knives—especially the spring-assisted and one-handed opening models politicians love to demonize—suddenly look a lot more like protected “bearable arms” than the scary outliers anti-knife laws pretend they are. What makes this move clever is how it piggy-backs on the post-Bruen analytical framework without asking courts to invent new doctrine. Instead of arguing policy or “sensitive places,” Knife Rights is simply pointing judges to controlling precedent that already treats knives as arms and already demands text-and-history scrutiny for any modern restriction. That lowers the temperature for jurists wary of expanding rights while still forcing the government to justify 1950s-era switchblade hysteria with 18th- and 19th-century evidence that mostly doesn’t exist. If the courts take the hint, we could see not just these three cases flipped, but a ripple effect that undercuts copycat bans in New York, New Jersey, and anywhere else legislatures still treat folding knives like contraband. For the broader 2A community the lesson is strategic as much as substantive: winning the long game sometimes means litigating the “other arms” the gun-control crowd hoped we’d ignore. Every precedent that treats a knife as a constitutionally protected arm tightens the textual noose around discretionary “may-issue” schemes, magazine bans, and feature-based restrictions that rely on the same flawed assumption—that government gets to decide which modern tools are “too dangerous” for law-abiding citizens. Knife Rights’ filings are a reminder that the right to keep and bear arms isn’t a gun-only club; it’s an individual liberty that travels with whatever instrument a free person reasonably chooses for defense, and the courts are finally being asked to say so out loud.

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What makes this move clever is how it piggy-backs on the post-Bruen analytical framework without asking courts to invent new doctrine. Instead of arguing policy or “sensitive places,” Knife Rights is simply pointing judges to controlling precedent that already treats knives as arms and already demands text-and-history scrutiny for any modern restriction. That lowers the temperature for jurists wary of expanding rights while still forcing the government to justify 1950s-era switchblade hysteria with 18th- and 19th-century evidence that mostly doesn’t exist. If the courts take the hint, we could see not just these three cases flipped, but a ripple effect that undercuts copycat bans in New York, New Jersey, and anywhere else legislatures still treat folding knives like contraband.

For the broader 2A community the lesson is strategic as much as substantive: winning the long game sometimes means litigating the “other arms” the gun-control crowd hoped we’d ignore. Every precedent that treats a knife as a constitutionally protected arm tightens the textual noose around discretionary “may-issue” schemes, magazine bans, and feature-based restrictions that rely on the same flawed assumption—that government gets to decide which modern tools are “too dangerous” for law-abiding citizens. Knife Rights’ filings are a reminder that the right to keep and bear arms isn’t a gun-only club; it’s an individual liberty that travels with whatever instrument a free person reasonably chooses for defense, and the courts are finally being asked to say so out loud.

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