MASSACHUSETTS CANNOT prohibit the carrying of switchblades, the state’s highest court ruled Tuesday, striking down a 67-year-old state law on Second Amendment grounds and opening the door to re-evaluating a host of other “bearable arms” banned in the Bay State.
Second Amendment protections are “not limited to firearms,” Justice Serge Georges wrote for a unanimous court. “Like handguns, a person can carry a switchblade for offensive or defensive purposes in case of confrontation.”
The case reached the SJC during a volatile period of Second Amendment interpretation. The legal scope of a right to bear arms has expanded substantially since the US Supreme Court’s 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling that the Constitution protects an individual right to possess and use a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
That decision and follow-up rulings tethered any discussion of what arms could be regulated in the modern day firmly to what the habits were around the country’s founding. But the US Supreme Court has not limited itself to the defense of “arms” as firearms. More than eight years ago, the US Supreme Court smacked down a Massachusetts ban on carrying stun guns that the SJC had upheld.
To regulate small knives, courts must first play historian and anchor the weapons in the era roughly between when the Constitution was signed and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.
“In the colonial and Revolutionary War era, colonists typically owned or were equipped with hatchets, swords, and knives to use in their defense,” Georges noted. “Although swords and daggers were the most common bladed weapons, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Americans also carried smaller knives with three to four inch blades that were used for self-defense, hunting, and trapping.”
In 2020, when David Canjura got into an altercation with his girlfriend Maria Torres in Boston, Massachusetts had a well-established ban on carrying a variety of deadly weapons including switchblades, blowguns, blackjacks, metallic knuckles, nunchaku, shuriken, and weighted chains. Carrying switchblades specifically had been banned in public in Massachusetts since 1957.
According to court filings, police responding to a report of an argument found Canjura apparently preventing Torres from walking away, pushing her against a wall and taking her phone. After police retrieved the phone and placed Canjura under arrest for assault and battery, a search revealed a “an orange firearm-shaped knife with a spring-assisted blade,” at his waist.
Though there is no allegation that the switchblade knife was ever drawn or brandished, that Canjura had it on his person violated the state ban.
While the case was being appealed, the US Supreme Court again reinterpreted Second Amendment law, applying a new test for determining whether a ban on carrying a certain weapon runs afoul of Constitutional protections. The New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen ruling imposed a two-part test to assess the history and usage of regulated arms.
The SJC, applying that test, first had to determine whether switchblade knives are the sorts of arms covered by the Second Amendment, then decide if the law in question regulates the weapon in a way that is consistent with historical tradition.
As for the first analysis, the court concluded that knives generally “were ubiquitous among colonists, who used them to defend their lives, obtain or produce food, and fashion articles from raw materials.”
Folding pocketknives in particular, Georges wrote, “not only fit within contemporaneous dictionary definitions of arms – which would encompass a broader category of knives that today includes switchblades – but they also were commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes around the time of the founding.”
Faced with the literal question of whether the state of Massachusetts historically regulated a class of folding pocketknife, the SJC concluded the ban on switchblades is inconsistent with founding-era practices.
“The Commonwealth does not identify any laws regulating bladed weapons akin to folding pocketknives generally, or switchblades particularly, in place at the time of the founding or ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Georges wrote.
Being a spring-triggered deadly weapon is not enough to deem switchblades “uniquely dangerous,” compared to other folding knives, and justify a ban, the court concluded. Further, these blades are also in current common use, with Georges noting that only seven states plus the District of Columbia categorically ban switchblades or other automatic knives.
“From these facts,” Georges wrote, “we can reasonably infer that switchblades are weapons in common use today by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes; more specifically, we can infer they are ‘widely owned and accepted as a legitimate means of self-defense across the country.’”
The court ruled Canjura’s charge under the switchblade ban must be vacated. In its decision, the SJC did not delve into or make mention of other weapons currently covered by the state ban.
Second Amendment law is still evolving at the highest court in the land, the SJC justices noted when the Canjura case was argued before them in December. At the time, the US Supreme Court had not yet ruled on United States v. Rahimi, which considered whether the government could bar a person with a current civil domestic violence restraining order from possessing a firearm.
The Supreme Court has since concluded that the challenged policy is permitted under the Second Amendment, using the historic test it laid out in Bruen.
SJC justices were acutely aware that they risked being overturned by a majority conservative US Supreme Court if they upheld the state switchblade ban. The combination of Heller and Bruen established that “weapons in common use are not the only ones protected,” Canjura’s lawyer, Kaitlyn Gerber, said in December.
“Well,” Justice Frank Gaziano remarked drily, “we found that out the hard way in the stun gun case.”