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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.
It leaves only a handful of states with switchblade bans on the books.
The case stemmed from a 2020 domestic disturbance in which police seized an orange firearm-shaped knife with a spring-assisted blade. The defendant was charged with carrying a dangerous weapon.
His appeal claimed the blade was protected by the Second Amendment.
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.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell criticized the ruling.
“This case demonstrates the difficult position that the Supreme Court has put our state courts in with the Bruen decision, and I’m disappointed in today’s result,” Campbell said in a statement. “The fact is that switchblade knives are dangerous weapons and the Legislature made a commonsense decision to pass a law prohibiting people from carrying them.
The Bruen decision upended gun and weapons laws nationwide. In Hawaii, a federal court ruling applied Bruen to the state’s ban on butterfly knives and found it unconstitutional. That case is still being litigated.
In California, a federal judge struck down a state law banning possession of club-like weapons, reversing his previous ruling from three years ago that upheld a prohibition on billy clubs and similar blunt objects. The judge ruled that the prohibition “unconstitutionally infringes the Second Amendment rights of American citizens.”
The Massachusetts high court also cited a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court opinion that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense in their homes as part of its decision.
